


Learning to Speak the Language of Flowers

by junkshopdisco



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst and Humor, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxious Aziraphale (Good Omens), Anxious Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley Has PTSD (Good Omens), Crowley is Good With Kids (Good Omens), Gardener Aziraphale (Good Omens), M/M, Missing Scene, Mutual Pining, Nanny Crowley (Good Omens), POV Crowley (Good Omens), Pining, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Post-Scene: The Ritz (Good Omens), Pre-Scene: Body Swap (Good Omens), also Crowley hates Thomas Hardy, and also Devon, aziraphale dealing with his feelings, but really Crowley does most of the gardening, picnicking without plot, poorly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2020-10-29 08:23:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 73,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20793608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junkshopdisco/pseuds/junkshopdisco
Summary: In the aftermath of the world not ending, Aziraphale and Crowley adjust to life on their own side in their own ways: with spider plant tending, reluctant shop opening, and a job lot of Thomas Hardy novels which refuse to be sold.That part is easy. It's the fallout from centuries of rejection which is hard.“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s tone is broken and determined at the same time. It’s been six thousand years and Crowley has never heard Aziraphale’s voice sound quite like that, not even when he was pleading for Crowley to do something on the airfield. “Kiss me.”It’s not a question.It becomes one, maybe, when Crowley doesn’t reply with action or words of his own, when he leaves it hanging in the echoing cavern of a kitchen, the only thing that exists even though it doesn’t exist at all.





	1. Waiting For You

**Author's Note:**

> Crowley spends a portion of this fic as Nanny Ashtoreth and uses male pronouns throughout in the narrative, just so you know what to expect in terms of representation. There are a lot of super British references in this-if you'd like any of them explaining, please hit me up on [tumblr](https://junkshop-disco.tumblr.com/post/187984965950/good-omens-fic-title-learning-to-speak-the) or [twitter](http://twitter.com/junkshopdisco). Likewise, if you're cautious about fics dealing with trauma and want more details before proceeding, I'm happy to provide, but the major theme of the fic is people learning to be there for each other after centuries of keeping their distance, via books and gardening and some bullshit Aristotle said once. 
> 
> If you fancy it, there's also an accompanying [playlist](https://junkshop-disco.tumblr.com/post/187985633770/learning-to-speak-the-language-of-flowers-ghost) for mood or whatnot.

The bus hisses to a stop in a car park that technically it shouldn’t be able to squeeze into. Aziraphale steps into the aisle, gesturing for Crowley to go ahead of him with a little bow.

Crowley swings to his feet and propels himself between the seats, tossing a casual, “Thanks,” over his shoulder to the baffled driver, who’s peering through the windshield and trying to work out where the spires of Oxford are as his final two passengers stagger down the stairs.

With a metallic clonk, Aziraphale drops the empty wine bottle into the recycling. He straightens his waistcoat, smoothing down the front as if he’s about to meet royalty rather than collapse in Crowley’s flat. He stares up at the building with something like trepidation and then fixes a smile over it. “Lead the way,” he says.

In the lift, he fidgets like a child resisting the urge to press the big, red emergency button, and at the door, he takes a breath as if he’s about to say on second thought, he’ll be fine, will find a lovely little B&B but thanks so much for the offer. Crowley pictures him trying to check in to a Premier Inn and almost suggests it. Aziraphale’s face when he enters his room and encounters the automatically-triggered, aggressive, purple headboard lighting would be a picture. That lighting constitutes one of Crowley’s finest inventions. In the hotel sphere at least. Right up there with phone chargers miles from the bed and kettles which take ten minutes to boil enough water to barely cover the teabag; he’s got a lot of mileage out of the frustrations of tired business travellers in the mid-range price bracket.

Whatever he was going to say, though, Aziraphale stows it, so Crowley unlocks the door with a click of his fingers. “My humble abode,” he says, setting the lighting to somewhere below dim but above clandestine romantic rendezvous. 

Aziraphale has never been here before. They’ve always met in parks and on teeming roads and, lately, in galleries where Aziraphale dawdles in the gift shop debating tea towels with the paintings of Old Masters on that he will invariable never use. When they needed to be alone, Crowley always said, ‘I’ll come to you.’ He likes the bookshop: the clutter and the knickknacks and the groaning shelves; the smell of paper centuries old and dust from bygone ages; the way candlelight and streetlight mingle and the noise from outside fades but not entirely out. The bookshop feels like indefatigable life.

Felt. 

“Nightcap?” he says. He gestures to the kitchen, with its large, humming fridge stocked with praline mushrooms and fine cheeses and wild garlic olives, all picked out in case Aziraphale ever decided to stop by. There’s cocoa in the cupboard and a biscuit tin with actual biscuits in it, ginger snaps and chocolate Hobnobs and bourbons, and next to that, a painting of Michael stabbing a fallen angel through the back with a spear.

Which, now he comes to think about it, is not ideal. If only he’d bought a Caravaggio tea towel to drape over it, that would’ve done the trick. 

“Well this is—very you,” Aziraphale says, as he takes in the room. “Oh and look. How delightful.” He steps across the concrete floor to examine a pilea peperomoides on the windowsill. It sits in a golden pot Crowley was gifted by Marcus Aurelius and the plant has grown to roughly four times the size Crowley was expecting it to. Consequently, continuing to shout at it tests him. Its large, round leaves sit on the end of extended stems like dinner plates, and they bristle with pride at Aziraphale’s compliment.

“Were you expecting a pit of burning tar?” Crowley says. “Girl Guides strung about the place like fairy lights?” He retrieves a couple of glasses and a bottle of single malt from the cabinet, ducks down to grab some round ice cubes from the freezer.

They clink as he deposits them in the glasses, drawing Aziraphale across the polished concrete to stand at his elbow. Crowley idly thinks about later, about magicking Aziraphale a pair of pyjamas and excusing himself to sleep on the sofa. Or, more likely, to prowl the bathroom until sunrise and catch forty anxious winks in the bathtub.

Aziraphale claims he doesn’t sleep, but Crowley has caught him more than once napping on a stack of books with a mug of something gone cold at his side. _Resting my eyes_, he always says, when roused, as if sleep is a divine weakness and not a pleasing way to pass the time. Or perhaps that’s why he claims not to indulge in it, so he can soar up to Heaven and tell them he exists in a state of perpetual vigilance. _No rest until the wicked are defeated! Not me, no sir-ee_. At least that’s not going to be a problem anymore.

Crowley unscrews the lid on the whisky. They picked it up on the Isle of Skye, took a tour of the distillery and were informed it’s infused with thistle or some—

“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s tone is broken and determined at the same time. It’s been six thousand years and Crowley has never heard Aziraphale’s voice sound quite like that, not even when he was pleading for Crowley to do something on the airfield. “Kiss me.”

It’s not a question.

It becomes one, maybe, when Crowley doesn’t reply with action or words of his own, when he leaves it hanging in the echoing cavern of a kitchen, the only thing that exists even though it doesn’t exist at all.

“Sorry, that was terribly forward,” Aziraphale says. “Only if you’d like to, of course, and if you’d rather not, I… understand. Absolutely. Completely.”

Crowley looks up.

“It’s just that today has been such a very long and very strange day. It feels as if everything has changed, everything is different, and—” Aziraphale pauses, his tongue peeking out but retreating again as if afraid to wet his lip as it intended. He attempts a soft chuckle. It turns into a thin, tight smile, and he glances at the wall as if there’s something in the expanse of flat grey which might hold his interest. “I feared if I didn’t ask you now, before this very strange day is over, I’d never find the courage again.”

Crowley’s thought about this so many times, so many ways. He thought about it today, even, with the fog of his own tears on the lenses of his glasses as he ordered another bottle in the pub, kicking every cell of himself for never saying it himself, _kiss me, Aziraphale_, having _not_ done it slipping into eternity, opportunity a very definitive kind of lost.

And now here it is.

In his kitchen.

Hanging.

He could do it. He could take Aziraphale’s terrified face in his hands and smooth his cheeks with his thumbs and whisper promises that everything will be alright directly to his gums. He could let himself be pushed against the wall, whisky forgotten, fears temporarily stowed behind a facade. He could trail his fingers down the back of Aziraphale’s coat and kiss him like the sky is falling, like it very nearly did and might again sooner than they can prepare for.

Crowley puts down the whisky. With aching care, he screws the lid back on, the noise of it maddeningly loud as it echoes off the bare walls of his kitchen. He slides his glasses down his nose and folds the arms. With two little clicks, they lock into place. He sets them on the counter. A bead of condensation is running down the side of the glass, a gift from the ice cube that’s melting in its little crystal prison. It pools, spreads, and Crowley watches it with his heart pounding as he tries to weigh a dozen options and exponentially more consequences all at once.

When he looks up, Aziraphale swallows.

He’s wearing an expression Crowley has seen several times through the last few centuries, one that says there’s a war going on inside his being. It says he’s picturing the tumult caused by ten million righteous angels descending on the Earth to wipe him out for whatever he’s thinking; it says he’s willing himself not to care.

Crowley leans in. He keeps his gaze trained on Aziraphale. His eyes flicker closed and his fingers tighten into a ball at the brush of Crowley’s jacket against his hand. He misses Aziraphale’s mouth and kisses his cheek, as softly as he can manage, lingers, just long enough for them both to really feel it, so Aziraphale will know it’s not rejection.

“You will,” he says, voice little more than breath on Aziraphale’s skin, but he knows that Aziraphale will hear it, will feel it, will breathe it in, if not understand entirely.

He goes back to the whisky, impressed with himself when he pours two with a steady hand, takes longer about it than the task needs to give Aziraphale the time to marshal his rapid, raggedy breathing and himself the space to picture the tear-fogged glasses version of himself screaming at him from the past.

“Come on,” he says, holding one of the glasses out, trying for convivial. “Let’s sit and watch the stars until the sun decides to get up.”

* * *

“You know, Aristotle thought plants had souls.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says, making a crestfallen face at the agapanthus which has wilted over its pot to the point Crowley can only tell what its shrivelled brown leaves are supposed to be because he was there when Aziraphale planted it. “That makes me feel so much better about killing this one.”

The gardens are the second best thing about the Ambassador’s residence. They invented the word ‘sprawling’ and the sun shines on them very pleasantly with just the right smattering of rain now and then to keep the grass lush and the honeysuckle releasing its fragrance into the air.

Crowley turns a page in the prim volume of _Stories for Boys_ he’s meticulously placing references to death and destruction into. “You didn’t kill it. You just… happened to not water it and then it… fainted a little.” Aziraphale makes an unconvinced humming noise, fussing with the lopsided stems. “Besides, agapanthus is known for its lassez-faire attitude to its own continuing existence. Everyone knows how difficult they are to please. Drama queens of the patio plant world, agapanthus.”

The radio, which had been emitting a trail for a new comedy panel show which sounds only marginally more appealing than being placed in thumb screws for eternity, switches back to a woman with a voice like plums in honey.

“Welcome back to Gardener’s Question Time. Next, we have Barbara from Bishops Stortford with a perpetually-relevant question about her patio. _Dear Alan_, she writes, _I’ve the most terrible black thumb and can’t even keep a spider plant alive. Are there any easy-care plants I might be able to manage on a patio_?”

“Oh Barbara, my dear, dear Barbara,” Alan says. “There’s no such thing as a black thumb. By ‘eck, it makes me sad to hear people say that. Go to the garden centre and get yourself a couple of lovely agapanthus, Barbara, they’re extremely forgiving of beginners—”

Aziraphale does a passable impression of a hippo wailing like it’s stepped on a plug; Alan carries on like the unfeeling bastard Crowley has always suspected he is.

“I might even go as far as to say they’re impossible to kill. Put them in a nice big pot and forget about them and they will thrive, Barbara—just remember to water them once every—”

Crowley snaps the radio off. “Titchmarsh.” He rolls his eyes and tuts. “What does Alan Titchmarsh know about gardening?”

Aziraphale doesn’t brighten. He stares forlornly at the pot, even though with less than a twiddle of his thumb he could have it blooming again. When they started this whole endeavour, he launched himself at it with vigour, poring over _The Well-Tempered Garden_ and _Rhapsody in Green_, the _Encyclopaedia of Plants and Flowers_ never long out of his hands. He muttered and made notes and drew plans on A4 paper, would never believe Crowley when he said that what most plants like, generally speaking, is to be left alone. When he overwatered a hibiscus to the point of eternal rest, in desperation he even bought a Titchmarsh book, but when Crowley asked him how it was, he flushed a colour a paint manufacturer would call something like Endless Fuchsia, leading Crowley to suspect he’d accidentally purchased one of his novels rather than a volume on herbaceous borders.

“Bite to eat later?” Crowley says. “It’s steak night at the Red Lion.”

“No it’s not, that’s Wednesdays.”

Crowley lifts an eyebrow. “I believe for regulars they might make an exception. They’re doing that sauce you like. The one that smells like the fourteenth century.”

“Oh all right, then,” Aziraphale says, moving the pot with the stricken agapanthus behind a hydrangea.

At the house, one of the doors opens, and Warlock barrels out with an American football and a barrage of questions about how the radishes are.

Aziraphale straightens, doffing his straw hat and adopting his Brother Francis face. “Master Warlock, full of questions today I see.” Grudgingly, he extends his hand, shooting an aggrieved look at the agapanthus. “Let’s go and check on ‘em, shall we?”

“Not too long, now,” Crowley says. “We’ve that project on injuries sustained during the War of the Roses to finish, remember?”

He watches Aziraphale amble, Warlock doing laps of him, to the vegetable patch, where Crowley has been cursing the slugs and bribing the lettuce to double in size. Aziraphale does_ actually_ have a black thumb, though, so like ever, their efforts are mostly just cancelling each other out.

With a sigh, he tips what remains of his ginger ale over the withered agapanthus. A rustle, and its thin, crispy leaves unfold and flood with colour. The stems leap to attention and sprout buds.

Crowley slips from the wrought iron chair and crouches down, eye level with the resurrected cluster of pale blue flowers.

“I’m watching you,” he says, and the plant obligingly throws out a handful of new flowers.

* * *

The first best thing about the Ambassador’s residence is its proximity to the Red Lion, a quaint, stone-built little place a short walk through the trees, with a roaring fire in winter, brass tankards above the fireplace, and jugs of Pimm’s when Wimbledon was on. They didn’t actually show Wimbledon—it’s not the kind of place where sports are shown on flickering screens in an attempt to attract custom, the very idea—but they did draw tennis balls on the Special’s board, which set a nice tone of seasonal whimsy.

Not that Crowley likes it for the chalk tennis balls or the Pimm’s or even the Specials; he likes it because he comes here with Aziraphale. It’s their local. Something they’ve never had in 6000 years. Sure, there are eavesdropping regulars, but they’re the kind of people with ruddy faces and four-pints-a-night cider habits, unlikely to be believed if they decide to take their tales of how they overheard two people having a serious discussion about a memo from Beelzebub further than the beer garden. 

Here, Aziraphale told Crowley after several small snifters that he had quite a crush, once upon a time, on Perry Como, and that he’s heard about this thing called miniature golf that’s all the rage on the continent and in America and sounds rather fun. His stories seep into the walls, kept safe in the crevices between old stones and in Crowley’s brain in pretty much the same way. They’ve dined at fancier places, the Ivy and Cafe Royal and even the Ritz, but Crowley likes it here, where he can imagine they’re not on a mission to stop the anti-Christ from laying waste to everything, that it’s just Thursday evening and they’re just two people who met at work and like wasting each other’s time.

The pub is about as empty as it always is on a Thursday evening, owing to a quite diverting quiz night at rival establishment The Leaping Dolphin, where £5 gets you entry to the quiz, a pint each, and half price on a bag of pork scratchings. It was their regular haunt until they were banned for winning too often. Aziraphale had been distraught for at least two weeks afterwards. ‘As if we’d cheat! Just to win a bottle of cheap house red! Really. The cheek.’ It wasn’t the quizmaster’s fault. It must be genuinely hard to outwit two supernatural entities who’ve been alive for literally everything covered in every round, especially when their mix of magical specialities means that even when they guess wildly—improbably, even—it always turns out to be the right answer.

Crowley orders their usual drinks—whiskey and ginger ale for him and a G&T with a twist of lemon and a splash of elderflower cordial for Aziraphale—and snags the menu from the bar, tucking it under his arm as he carries their round to the small table Aziraphale has claimed in the window.

Outside, it’s not howling a gale so much as whistling one, the wind that thin, razor-like kind which whips right through you. It played havoc with Crowley’s skirt on the way over and he wishes he’d followed Aziraphale’s example and pretended to be his own nephew.

He hands Aziraphale the menu, even though invariably he will order the steak with the stinky sauce and a treacle pudding for afterwards.

“Thank you.” Aziraphale takes a sip of his drink. “Oh no wait, this will never do.”

“Wha—?”

With a sniff, Aziraphale sweeps the tiny vase sporting a yellow carnation off the table. He stands, briskly, looks about, and swaps it for one with a pale lilac rose in. “There.”

“Clash with your outfit or something?”

Aziraphale’s knee knocks against his as he sits down again. He opens the menu, reading it with hungry eyes and a contemplative mouth. “You know, I think I will have the steak,” he says. “And apple pie for afterwards? Oh, wait, no, I’ll have the treacle pudding, since the weather’s so frightful.”

“Custard?”

“Naturally. Pudding isn’t pudding without custard.”

When he gets back from placing their order, Crowley takes pains to put his knee back exactly where it was, just adjacent to Aziraphale’s, so they’re not brushing but may very well do so should either of them make the slightest adjustment in position.

They do that here. Touch at the knees under the table. Brush elbows, sometimes, on the way home.

He has no idea what it means. 

“Going to head office next Friday,” he says. “Status report, all that.”

“I should do the same, probably.” With a roll of his eyes, Aziraphale swirls the ice cubes in his glass. “Not that anyone will care.”

“They’re not chasing you for updates?”

“Not really. We’ve been here what, almost two years, and I can barely pencil a meeting to discuss our progress. They’re all frightfully busy with planning for the war, though.”

Crowley hums in consideration. He can never decide if he envies Aziraphale the disinterest of his side or feels bad for him. There’s not much you can say about Hell in terms of positive workplace culture, but at least they care what he’s up to. Granted, his superiors are mostly looking for missteps to rake him over literal coals for, but when he goes in and delivers a speech about how things are going, at least half the room pretends to pay attention.

“So we’ll both be in town?” Aziraphale says, hiding half the question behind his G&T. “On a Friday night?”

“Suppose we will. Could catch a concert or a play, perhaps.”

“We haven’t been to the theatre in ages.”

“Not since that terrible production of _Richard II_, where they’d decided to do the entire thing on mopeds. The smell of two-stroke had half the circle gagging into their hankies while the rest strained to hear the dialogue over the puttering of the engines.”

Aziraphale’s eyes twinkle at the memory. “You know I still think that was your doing.”

“I told you. I don’t mess with the comedies.”

“_Richard II_ isn’t a comedy.”

Crowley strokes his chin. “Oh, is it not?”

Aziraphale tilts his head as if he can’t tell whether or not Crowley is joking. “Check the listings? I’m in the mood for something new and exciting.”

The waitress arrives with the plate balanced on her arm, cutlery and sauce jug clutched in her hand. “Steak?” she says.

“Me, please.”

She lays it down in front of Aziraphale, squinting at it as if only now remembering they don’t serve steak on Thursdays. “Enjoy your… meal,” she says, and walks back to the kitchen, shooting glances at them and shaking her head while several other diners meerkat up in envy from their Specials Board chicken curry.

Aziraphale likes his steak well done on the outside and pink in the middle, and he always eats it the same way: cutting it into two perfectly equal pieces—or as close as he can get it—and starting with the pink bit. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try?”

Crowley shakes his head. If he eats more than once a month he feels like… well, like a snake that’s eaten too much. If he’s not careful, one too many trips to the buffet can leave him stranded in bed, beached on the contents of his own stomach. 

“Can I ask you something?” Aziraphale says, drizzling the sauce over the hand cut chips lying neatly to the side of his steak. “Warlock. Do you think he is… as expected?”

“Hard to say.” Crowley takes a sip of his drink. “He talks to his parents like they’re the liquid that collects under a bin bag, but I mean all children are a bit sociopathic, aren’t they? It’s difficult to separate, you know, general child stuff from actual evil.”

“And not to be unkind, but they are a little—well, you know.” Aziraphale gestures with his fork, which Crowley takes to mean distant and shouty and bin juice-like.

He takes a longer swig of his drink. Being around a child, watching him grow, learn, and yes, be susceptible to influences, has certainly been thought provoking. “Wonder what it’s like to have parents. Even setting the Satan stuff aside, isn’t it weird to look at these two other people and know that you’re half of each of them sort of… smashed together? Do they feel it, do you think? Oh that’s dad’s arm but mum’s elbow, this is mum’s personality but I’m expressing it in dad’s voice?”

“Don’t forget the grandparents. They’re not really a composite of two people so much as—” Aziraphale looks up at the beams. “—four? But then _they_ had grandparents too so that’s… eight? No, wait, sixteen? Twenty-four? Forty-two?”

“Maybe it’s more like… a cake, then,” Crowley says.

“A cake?”

“To make offspring, take two pinches of great-great Grandma, a teaspoon of Granddad, toss it all in with the mum flour.”

Aziraphale spears a chip and raises his eyebrow. “There’s definitely eggs involved, I know that much.” He dabs at the corner of his mouth with a paper towel that he’s folded into a perfect triangle. “These are very good.”

He shifts and his knee grazes Crowley’s leg, causing a veritable riot through Crowley’s central nervous system, which Crowley tries vainly to ignore. “How do they know who they are, though?” he says. “If they’re all these bits of other people, how do they know where they start and the… ancestor mix ends?”

“You’d have to ask them.”

“Sure, that’d go down well. ‘Scuse me, stranger-human, do you feel the presence of your uncle in your left ear at all?”

“I’m sure they’re quite accustomed to it.”

“Just seems like it must be quite complicated for them, is all.”

Aziraphale’s eyebrow inches higher. “Perhaps you should’ve thought of some of this before you tempted the first humans into reproducing.”

Crowley can’t think of an adequately scathing reply, so he makes a scathing face instead.

* * *

“One for the road?” Aziraphale says.

They’re standing outside the cottage that comes with the gardener position. Aziraphale’s never learnt that ‘one for the road?’ is what you say before leaving the pub, not what you say when you get home, when the road is to all intents and purposes no longer relevant and doesn’t need a final vodka, lime, and soda sacrificed to it.

“Why not?”

Aziraphale unlatches the gate and ushers him through the little private garden, a clipped lawn with box hedge on three sides and geraniums planted in the border. Dog roses crawl up the cottage walls and, around the neat green door, true roses pepper the trellis. They’re budding, almost about to bloom. Crowley intended pink but he switches them to pale lilac as he heads inside.

Inside, the kitchen is a cacophony of pans and pots in different materials, colanders and dried herbs hanging from the beams. He has to duck to get under the doorway which leads into the study: a cosy enclave of a room with the remains of an ancient bread oven hewn into one of the walls. Aziraphale is using it as a place to store his gardening volumes and a single, almost-spent candle. Two armchairs sit either side of the fireplace and from the wall scowls a portrait of Eisenhower, which clashes awfully with the cheerful flowered curtains.

Aziraphale selects a bottle of red from the fireplace wine rack, blows the chimney dust off it, and uncorks it, setting it aside to breathe for a moment while he finds a record. His things fit so nicely here, against the old stone walls and low ceilings and scratched, dark wooden floors. It’s as if he’s been here for centuries.

In contrast, Crowley has a room in the house where his clothes hang in the fitted wardrobes but that’s about all. He’s never been very good at populating a space. Or never found a space he wanted to populate, maybe. Everything he keeps is chosen for those who might see it, less an expression of his personality and more like an intricate puzzle for others to solve. Which, perhaps, is like hanging his personality on the walls after all.

He settles into one of the armchairs, a soft wingback with a dip carved out by dozens of shifting arses over the years, sinking so low into it he’s probably not even visible from behind. The scratchy record player in the corner starts up with a melody that suggests crooning is mere bars away.

“I do like this one. Perhaps we could see if she’s touring and by some miracle is playing in London, say, next Friday?”

“I regret to inform you, Aziraphale, that Judy Garland been dead for quite some time. I could—” Crowley shrugs a shoulder up, wincing at the thought. “—reanimate her for you? But I’d have to find some humans to haunt with her too, otherwise head office are going to be all over it.”

He accepts the glass of wine Aziraphale offers him, smiling at the wrinkle of Aziraphale’s nose.

“Quite all right, thank you.” Aziraphale perches on the edge of the other wingback’s seat, so they’re bracketing the place a fire would be if the hearth wasn’t just a hearth. “I think I prefer live performances by people who are, well, still alive.” He sighs, swirls his wine around his glass. “Talking of dead things—I was wondering, actually,” Aziraphale says, “you listen to that gardening programme and you have a lot of opinions about our plant friends—perchance, do you know how to garden?”

Crowley pushes his glasses up his nose. “Why?”

“Warlock asked me the most basic question earlier about what makes radishes grow and I came rather unstuck. I tried to say well it’s God, isn’t it? God makes things grow—but apparently he has a book about photosynthesis.” Aziraphale frowns into his wine and sighs so heavily the top of it ripples. “I fear my lack of green thumbs is going to be our undoing. The books aren’t helping nearly as much as I thought they might.”

“You can just lie. He’s a child—what does he know about the watering requirements of radishes?”

“That’s what you do, is it? You just lie to him?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

In truth, Crowley doesn’t lie to Warlock about anything but who his parents are. He tells him about the greatest wars there have ever been and how they ravaged the planet and lay waste to generations, about the distant stars and planets and how they came to be, about the workings of his cells and how his skeleton keeps him upright. And yes, he buys him books on things like photosynthesis because the more he learns about the world, the less likely he is to wipe it aside with a click of his fingers. Crowley reasons he can pass off rationality as anti-God, if it comes to it.

Aziraphale gives a little huff of impatience.

“All right, fine, I dabble,” Crowley says. “No radishes though.”

“I expect it’s all much the same.”

“That’s probably why you keep killing things.”

“Will you teach me or not?”

“I’ll—talk and you can listen. That’s it,” Crowley says. “No weeding, no bothering me about dandelions in the lawn, and don’t ask me to explain why you can grow a rose bush from a single stem if you plant it in a potato because nobody knows.”

Aziraphale grins, leaning forward to pour Crowley more wine. He raises his glass for Crowley to clink against. “I’m sure we’ll make quite the team.”

“Maybe that’s how humans feel,” Crowley muses as he obligingly clinks. “Like they’re a team. Only… internally.”

There’s a brief interlude of static as the track changes.

“Oh this one is so delightfully sad, don’t you think?” Aziraphale says.

Crowley smiles noncommittally and works his shoulders further down the back of the chair. He wonders if humans can feel all the different aspects of themselves which have been cobbled together from their ancestors pushing and pulling in different directions, one part wanting a thing that’s diametrically opposed to the longing of another.

What if their brains are constantly listening to differing opinions, trying to decide which bit to listen to, which part of themselves to follow? It’d certainly explain a thing or two about Judy Garland.

How do they live like that?

How is he supposed to prepare Warlock for a lifetime of that? Because if they succeed, that’s what awaits him. Fine, he’s no longer destroyer of the world, but he’s still a displaced child with bin juice parents who want him to grow up to be A Man’s Man and a diplomat like his daddy, he’s still had his head pumped full of America-centric propaganda and Aziraphale’s doctrine on light and good and kindness and Crowley’s war and death and destruction. Never mind questions about radishes, that’s a lot to handle.

“You’re very quiet, all of a sudden.”

Sometimes when Aziraphale says things in that tone, all low and private, Crowley thinks what he’s thinking must be poured all over his face like a disgruntled lover just upended his thoughts on his forehead like house white.

Crowley takes a gulp of his wine. “Just thinking.”

“Care to share about what?”

Crowley waves. “Stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“You know,_ stuff_, like… did Judy Garland have a team of ancestors inside her, all telling her to do different things?”

Aziraphale’s eyes widen and he scrabbles for the record cover, flipping it over to the photo. “Do you think there was room?”

Crowley takes off his glasses just so Aziraphale can see him roll his eyes.

“Ah, you meant more… philosophically,” Aziraphale says, sitting back just an inch or two, which for him is like Crowley throwing a leg over the arm of the chair. He turns the sleeve over in his hands. “Is this about the cake thing from earlier?”

It is and it isn’t at all.

Crowley shrugs.

“Everyone has influences, I suppose, that they carry with them,” Aziraphale says. “Some good, some… not so.”

“Humans, sometimes they call that stuff demons, but it’s not us.” Aziraphale bounces the corner of the record sleeve off his lip, peering at Crowley over the top in disbelieving consideration. “All right sometimes it _is_ us, sometimes we do tempt the rich and famous with… more riches and more fame, usually. You’d think they’d get bored of it, that at some point it’d all just be meaningless numbers on a page, but it’s amazing, the way they can talk themselves into thinking more is always necessary. I offered Lionel Ritchie the chance to reinvent himself as an icon of the burgeoning dance music scene in return for twenty-five percent of his soul and he didn’t even haggle.” Aziraphale squints at him as if he’s a particularly taxing cryptic crossword clue. “That’s not my point. My point is—we tend to be quite specific about what we’re trying to achieve. When someone dies tragically, they say their demons led them to it, like demons are the lead-y thing and they’re horses and the drugs or whatever are water. I’m just saying that’s a very simplistic way of looking at things. If they’ve got all these… ancestral influences at war inside themselves, all of them saying _go here, do this, no that, no don’t, what are you thinking_—well that might explain it, mightn’t it? They don’t know what to do because they don’t know who they are. Or what they really want. Or what’s good for them. Especially what’s good for them.”

On the turntable, Judy hits a high note, voice cracking just a little as if in illustration.

“Maybe you have a point.”

“Maybe I don’t,” Crowley says, with a sigh. “I mean, I was created as a whole entire thing at once, and I don’t know who I am, which bit of myself to listen to, a lot of the time. So who am I to talk.”

Aziraphale hums in consideration for a long time before offering him a small smile and another top-up. He glances to the window, where, if the curtains weren’t drawn and it wasn’t dark and there wasn’t a sizeable hedge in the way, the patio might be visible. “I noticed what you did to that poor plant I killed, by the way,” he says.

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Crowley says, but as he’s leaving, he adds another couple of roses around the door, anyway.

* * *

The next day, Aziraphale throws open the shed door with a gleeful, “Right, then.”

A spider tumbles from where it had been happily perched in its web above the frame and lands in his hair. He leaps back, arms flailing. “Get it off! Get it off me!!” Crowley steps in to do just that but Aziraphale shrinks away from him. “But gently, don’t hurt it.”

With a sigh, Crowley plucks the spider up, watching as it dangles from his finger on a thread. “Oh look at you. Yes wave those legs. Very scary.” He blows it towards the border, where it lands safely on a begonia which happens to have a couple more aphids than is strictly necessary for it to enjoy for lunch. “You know most spiders have asthma?” he says, to Aziraphale’s startled face. “Or so scientists say. I don’t know how they actually _know_. Sounds like something the Almighty would do though, doesn’t it? Give a creature asthma just because. Like when She made a duck’s quack not echo just to fuck with everyone.”

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason for both of those things.” Aziraphale pulls his soft gardening hat lower down his forehead and gestures to the shed. “Shall we?”

The shed has been a little under-loved and a lot-under tidied. Pots litter the shelves, upside down, on their sides, big ones haphazardly rammed into smaller ones, so the look is that of a stack precariously about to topple, but also covered in so many cobwebs as to suggest none of it has moved in a long time. The window is opaque with yet more spider webs, skeleton leaves caught in them, and on the other side, the wall has a beautiful display of the outlines of where tools used to be, while the tools themselves have been tossed into an old crate and left to rust.

“You lot,” Crowley says, with a wave of his hand. “Sort yourselves out. You’re a disgrace.” A second later they’re all gleaming and hanging where they should be. “Good,” he says. “Now you’re practically begging to be stolen.” He clears the window too and selects a watering can from the assortment of buckets and cans piled in the corner.

They step out into the meagre sunlight. It’s the perfect day for it: Warlock off on a playdate with the son of an oil tycoon, his mother on a spa day, and his father in another country. There are a couple of other staff members inside polishing things and patrolling the front gate, but they know to keep their distance from the strange austere, nanny. They stroll over to the vegetable patch. Potatoes are making a valiant stab at growing up through the weeds and around the edges is something that might turn into pumpkins, given a little motivation.

“Where should I start?” Crowley says.

“At the beginning, I think,” Aziraphale says, wringing his hands.

“Basics. Right. Well—” Crowley waves at the surrounding vegetation. “These are plants—and to grow, plants need water, they need soil, they need nutrients, they need air, they need light, and, most importantly, they need space and time.”

Aziraphale’s face is that of a schoolboy who was just called upon to answer a question and spent the last four years daydreaming. “Can we go through those one at a time, perhaps? Starting with water?”

“Well, that one’s easy. If they look dry, crispy, wilty—give them some water. Spot it early. Set a rota. If it hasn’t rained in a while, see if they’ve gone a bit faint-y.”

“They _faint_?”

Crowley crouches down, hitching up his skirt as he leans over to pick up the leaves of one of the sad looking petunias in the bed. “Like this one, see?”

“Oh no the poor thing.” Aziraphale pushes his hat off his head and kneels down, clutching the hat to his chest like a mourner in a Frank Holl painting.

“There’s no need to be like that—it just needs a drink.”

Crowley picks up the watering can which is _fortunately_ full of water, despite having been abandoned for months. Droplets fall like rain over the leaves, making him think of an illustration of Mother Nature in one of Warlock’s books. For the sake of demonstration, he gives them a little persuasion of his own and watches as the plants perk up, purple and white mottled trumpets shaking with the motion.

“Easy as that?” Aziraphale says.

“Easy as that. Just don’t overwater. Soil gets boggy, attracts pests. Think of it like—” He pauses, struggling for a metaphor Aziraphale will be able to understand. “—giving them a little tipple regularly, only a full bottle when they’re having a really rough day.”

“Righty-ho.”

“So, soil,” Crowley says, ruffling the dirt in the flowerbed. It’s stony and a little dry, but someone must’ve cared for it once because below the surface, it’s a richer colour. “Key words here are organic matter and micro-organisms.”

“Mi-cro-org-anisms? What are those?”

“Little critters. Very, very little critters. Too small for you to see so don’t worry about ‘em. Put a buffet on and they will come.”

“A buffet?”

“Manure, compost, leaf mulch from that big stinky pile out the back, which is definitely upsetting the neighbours.”

Aziraphale wrinkles his nose. “Tasty.”

“To them, it’s a four course supper in one of your nice little gastro-pubs. Chuck it in. Fork it over.”

“Fork it over? What on earth do you mean?”

“Fork it. You know, fork it?” Crowley mimes digging a fork into the ground and turning the earth. “Use a fork. Big one in the shed, not one of your little cake forks,” he adds, for clarity.

Aziraphale murmurs. If he does anything whatsoever with leaf mulch, Crowley will eat his wellies. “Now, plants need nutrients. Bunch of ‘em. Like phosphorous. They need that for flowers and roots. Potassium—ward off diseases. Nitrogen. This one is really important. They need nitrogen to make their leaves nice and green and… leafy. But that’s no big deal, there’s loads of it. Loads and loads. It’s the most abundant element on Earth and top ten through the solar system.”

Aziraphale sinks back on his heels. “How am I supposed to make sure they get all that?”

“Humans have made it all very easy. Tip it into their water from the handy bottles in the shed marked _plant food_. Match the pictures on the bottles to what you’re pouring it on. That’s it.”

“Right. Water. Food. Bottles. I think I can manage that.”

Crowley gets to his feet, brushing stray dirt off his long wool skirt. “Why’d you offer to be their gardener if you don’t know any of this stuff anyway?”

“I thought it’d be fun. Lots of fresh air and lovely flowers.” Aziraphale meets his eye, sheepish and defensive. “Besides, you don’t know anything about being a nanny.”

“That’s not true. I saw _Mary Poppins_ fourteen times.”

“What’s Mary Poppins?”

“Film about a demon who’s harnessed the power of wind to fly wherever she wants through space and time.”

“Sounds very educational.”

Crowley ignores him—if he gets into talking about Mary Poppins, they’ll be here all week. “Plants also need air and light—”

“I can make it light,” Aziraphale says.

“Yeah, sure—er—but we could also use the organic, sun-based stuff? Just don’t plant anything where you wouldn’t sit for a nice little picnic and that should be fine. This is comfrey,” Crowley says, picking up a handful of leaves he’s had out drying on the wall. “Organic matter. I whacked some in around the compost when we arrived. Draws minerals into the soil from the depths of the earth and—”

Aziraphale’s face softens. “You did that?”

Crowley grimaces. “Needed an activity for little what’s-his-face, something really boring, that’s all. Besides, comfrey is a—a—demonic tool. Brings you luck when you’re gambling. Told him all about that—pockets full of comfrey and off to the slot machines to beef up your pocket money.” Aziraphale frowns rather pleasingly. “Sent him into a spiral of curiosity about herbs that can be used in witchcraft.”

Aziraphale pokes at a clump of foliage with his toe. “So this is all full of dark magic, is it?”

“They’re broad beans, Aziraphale,” Crowley says. “I thought you’d at least recognise the food ones.” He waves the comfrey leaves in Aziraphale’s face. “Crumble these and put them on the tomatoes.”

“Which ones are they?”

“Oh for crying out loud.”

Crowley gestures to the greenhouse. The panes are so dirty they could be frosted and the frame already looks like it’s being held up with magic. Inside, the floor is littered with the carcasses of deceased insects, not unlike the printer room in Hell, but with a bit less swearing. Under a couple of vines that have broken in through the window, a job lot of tomato plants Crowley ordered from a catalogue are sitting on the side, awaiting attention. It’s the wrong time of year to plant them, but if they know what’s good for them, they’ll be fine anyway.

He shows Aziraphale how to dig holes for them, tip them out of their pots without breaking their stems, and plant them. Aziraphale makes a big deal out of each step, asking questions about if the plants mind being uprooted, if they can tell they’re briefly upside down, if he should do this or that to make them comfortable in their new abode. And Crowley answers: no, they don’t need a welcome gift, no, they don’t need introducing to the other plants, no, they won’t get bullied by the trees.

“Just put them in and let them do the rest,” Crowley says.

When they’re done, Aziraphale wipes his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief and stuffs that and his hat into his pocket. There’s dirt on his temple and, perplexingly, another spider weaving an intricate web in his fringe. “You’ve got a—” Crowley gestures to it but Aziraphale just goes to get his handkerchief to mop at his face again. “No, an—”

He’s not sure how Aziraphale will take it if he says _arachnid_ because truth be told, he’s not sure Aziraphale is that good with animals of any kind, let alone the ones with eight legs and more eyes than an angel.

“Come here.” He steps closer, inspecting Aziraphale’s fringe, where the spider is dodging under hairs and then back over them in an intricate dance. Aziraphale’s quiet breathing tickles his neck and Crowley peers at the strands at his temple, trying not to get distracted. He reaches in and parts two curls just above Aziraphale’s ear.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, with some surprise.

“Just let me…” The spider makes a break for it, scrambling over Aziraphale’s hair like a contestant on an assault course game show. It scuttles into a miniature blond tunnel. Crowley angles his face, trying to spot where it’ll emerge, places his finger to catch it. Aziraphale’s hair is silky soft, like Crowley might imagine clouds felt, if he didn’t know they weren’t made of anything you can touch. “There you are.” The spider runs over his thumb. “I’ve got you.”

He lifts it away, watching as the tiny, black spider scampers over the back of his hand, making for the dark cavern of his sleeve. He turns his hand so the spider runs into his palm, making a cocoon of his fingers so he doesn’t drop it between them into Aziraphale’s wellies.

It’s only when he’s deposited the spider on one of the tomato plants that he realises Aziraphale is staring at him with a slightly open mouth. “What?” Crowley says.

“What?” Aziraphale returns faintly. He blinks. “What? Oh—er—nothing.” He shakes his head, runs his hand over the place where Crowley’s fingers just were, flashes Crowley a thankful smile.

Crowley takes a purposeful step back. Like plants, Aziraphale needs both time and space. He fixes his gaze on the tomatoes. “So… just need to remember to water them every morning before the sun gets going, really.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

“It’ll create a sinkhole beneath the greenhouse and suck everyone and everything within a forty mile radius straight into Hell.”

Aziraphale’s face goes ashen.

Sometimes it’s just too easy.

Crowley ducks down, patting the rest of the compost into place around the stems and sprinkling the comfrey on top. “Skin splits. It’s aesthetically displeasing.” He stands back to appraise the row. “Listen up,” he mutters, “you’ll all produce the best, most bountiful crop any tomato plant is capable of.”

One of the plants pops out a cluster of small but already red tomatoes.

“Oh look at—”

“I said bountiful,” Crowley says.

A shiver runs down the line and one by one, each of plants complies.

“You’re very good at this,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley spots a fascinating collection of leaves on the nearest rowan tree. He recalls a seventeenth century woman who was tried for witchcraft on the basis of having a couple of rowan twigs bound with red thread stuffed in her pocket to ward off evil spirits. For something supposed to protect against evil forces, this one is doing a very poor job. Not even glancing disdainfully in Crowley’s direction.

“I mean it,” Aziraphale says. “It’s a real talent.”

_I created galaxies_, Crowley thinks. “Tomatoes are easy.”

Aziraphale picks one of the tomatoes and pops it into his mouth. “They’re tasty, though.”

Crowley supposes it’s a fair point. There are a lot of things you can do with a globular cluster but eating it in a sandwich isn’t one of them.

They make their way through the vegetable patch, picking weeds out of the lines of radishes, carrots, and salad leaves, Crowley explaining what each plant is. Aziraphale listens as if he’s trying very hard to take it in and not succeeding, and Crowley’s reminded of the first time he saw him in the garden, when from his vantage point in a bush, he saw Aziraphale fretting over standing on a echinacea. Even then, Aziraphale was not a gardener. Not much of a guard either, he supposes, having turned a blind eye to the giant demonic snake slithering about the place.

From there, they go into the formal section of the grounds, where the hedges make a low maze and a replica of a knot garden has been planted in chamomile and thyme. He takes Aziraphale through how to pick off the seeds and set them to dry out and dead head the flowers so they keep on blooming.

Aziraphale picks a marguerite and absentmindedly twirls it between his fingers. “Reminds me of Stratford,” he says. “Do you remember?”

“Not likely to forget that, am I,” he says. “Being thrown out of Shakespeare’s house.”

“Well you _were_ responsible for Tennyson scratching his name into one of the windows.”

“I didn’t expect him to actually do it. When I said he should leave his mark on history, I hardly meant that. Do you have any idea what kind of paperwork’s involved when you’re supposed to tempt a poet to write a verse which’ll foster resentment throughout the lands and all you end up with is an act of minor vandalism?”

Aziraphale laughs, lifting the marguerite to his nose, like he did in Stratford with a clover plucked from the riverbank.

It was the most glorious afternoon. They sat under the branches of a willow, the ends of which kissed the surface of the water, reminiscing about Burbage and if he and William were really lovers as the canal boats ambled past. He remembers saying it’d be a lot of pressure, being romantically entangled with a poet, that any argument would be on uneven footing when one person had so many witty expressions to choose from, while Aziraphale argued it’d be harder to be in love with an actor, someone so skilled at deception it came easier to them than their own words.

“What were you doing there, again?” Crowley says, glancing at him askance.

“I don’t recall, now.”

That had been quite a century for Aziraphale happening to be where Crowley was with no particular purpose he could disclose. The only other time they’ve seen each other so frequently is the last few years.

“Well I don’t know about you,” Aziraphale says, “but I’m famished. Let me take you to lunch? Little exchange for your expertise?”

“You don’t have to. I didn’t have anything else on.”

“I insist.”

Crowley waves towards the path between the trees which will take them to the pub. “Then lead on,” he says, and behind him, the flowers in the knot garden put on half a foot of growth.


	2. You're My Waterloo

Crowley wakes to find Aziraphale hunched over the scrap of charred parchment which fluttered out of Agnes’s book. The smell of tea loiters on the air and the smattering of crumbs across the desk suggests Aziraphale found the biscuit tin. Crowley smiles, safe in the knowledge Aziraphale’s attention is devoted to a notebook Crowley borrowed indefinitely from the National Gallery gift shop. He’s liberally decorated a page with squiggles and crossed out words and a drawing of someone which might either be Jesus or Agnes Nutter herself.

“Morning,” Aziraphale says, without looking up from the parchment. “Sleep well?”

Crowley slept in a ball in the corner of the room, spine pressed uncomfortably to the wall to reassure himself he was here, in his flat, and not in the burning bookshop. He only went to bed two hours ago, when dawn started tickling the bottom of the sky and the whisky bottle sat empty. Hard to feel well-rested when, above and below, the best way to hunt them is being debated as if it were a question about where to buy paperclips. He twitches the corner of his mouth in reply. “Agnes Nutter?” he says.

“Hmmm.” A frown skitters across Aziraphale’s face before he looks up. “What you said last night—”

For a horrible moment, Crowley thinks he wants to talk about the kiss, but Aziraphale pushes the scrap towards him. “I think you’re right.”

“You thought I was right last night too, as I recall.”

“Yes, but now I’m sober.” A tight smile and he looks down at the notebook. “As you said, our respective sides will come for us—that’s a given—it’s what they find that will decide our fate.”

Crowley hadn’t put it quite like that.

_Bunch of bastards_, he’d said, hoisting himself onto the balcony railing. He sloshed the contents of the bottle at all of them at once, possibly splattering whisky on anyone who happened to be out for a late night dog-walk. _They can come and get us but can they handle us? Can they? CAN they? I stopped time and you possessed a witch. Four horsemen! We—smote ‘em. Or three of them. And so we didn’t smite them personally but we were there when it happened and that’s… something. Anyway. It’s a confidence game, this. Always has been. Point is—the point is—let them fucking try, Aziraphale, let them fucking try. They don’t know who they’re messing with._

Aziraphale spluttered, grabbed the parchment, squinted at it and shouted _YES, that’s it, FACES, different faces!! So they don’t know who they’re messing with!!!! _to which Crowley had replied, quite simply,_ what? _and got a near hysterical_ she knew about the cocoa!_ in reply.

“So we’re agreed? That’s the plan?”

“Of course,” Crowley says. “Er—remind me what it is again? Little fuzzy on the… part with the… details.”

“We swap faces,” Aziraphale says, illustrating himself with a flourish.

Crowley grimaces as, like a very stupid, drunken idea, it comes crawling back in. Inhabiting humans to hide had been floated and disregarded as both unethical and impractical—no one needed some random human pulling a Madam Tracey in the bowels of Hell—and after that had been ruled out, the answer seemed obvious.

Each other. A simple, mutual possession.

Possible?

Yes, they thought so.

Potential to go wildly, catastrophically wrong?

Yes, that too.

To take their minds off the dawning reality of there being no real alternative choice, they’d had a metaphysical discussion about the relationship of the soul to the body until someone from a balcony further down the building yelled, “Will you two fucking shut it?”

Crowley set all their alarms to go off at 5am while Aziraphale offered apologies to the night sky, and when they went back inside, it seemed like something had been decided.

Apparently, it was this.

“Are you ready to try?” Aziraphale says. “Or is there anything you want to put in order first, just in case?”

Crowley surveys the flat as if he’s considering it, but the only thing he cares about is the person asking the question. Either they’ll both explode or neither of them will and there’s a kind of comfort in that. He holds out his hand.

Aziraphale looks at it, as if this is the thing he wasn’t prepared for, like it’s two hundred years ago and Crowley has skirted the edges of a dance floor to ask him to Viennese Waltz in a room full of elegant debutants. With a tight smile, he takes Crowley’s hand, tentative at first, then clasping. They could do this remotely; Aziraphale proved that. Crowley only held his hand out because it felt like the thing to do. And ok, he wanted to do it just in case they _do_ explode into a million gooey pieces and hands become an entirely abstract concept. It’d bring his disembodied middle finger some comfort, at least, to know it didn’t die alone.

“On three?” Aziraphale says.

“We’re not doing the hokey-cokey.”

“No but we need to be aligned. Wouldn’t do for one of our bodies to be standing around with no soul inside it while two squash into the other one, would it?”

“Fine,” Crowley says. He meets Aziraphale’s eye. “One, two—”

“Three.”

Crowley pictures it, being in Aziraphale’s body, wearing his cells like an overcoat. He creates a space inside himself to accommodate Aziraphale, and when he can hold both in his head in perfect detail, magic rises up, hot, metallic, and airless through his feet. He shivers as a different kind of magic filters down from above like cool, even rain. The two meet in his torso, a mingling of their magics—themselves, he supposes—which flashes hot and cold and ebbs out in waves where they connect. A wisp-like tingle and he stirs through space, culminating in a sensation of dropping and pooling somewhere… else.

Airy.

Peaceful.

Serene.

He looks down. Aziraphale’s trousers are where his own were not even a whole moment ago.

Only they’re not his trousers.

They’re his legs.

The shiver of realisation goes through him, like fingernails scratching down the back of his soul, alerting him to the danger of his new surroundings, but after a second, everything settles and he feels, for the first time in a very, very long time, calm.

Crowley wiggles the toes and shifts the shoulders.

Heaven magic lingers all over him. He’d forgotten how nice it felt.

Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he just stopped thinking about it so he stopped missing it, so the jagged, jittering magic of Hell was easier to live with. It occurs to him that maybe it’s not even Heaven he’s feeling, that it’s Aziraphale’s magic which feels like this. He pushes the thought aside in case there’s enough of Aziraphale left to hear his thoughts; he’s not sure exactly how that part works. “Ok?” he says.

His own face looks back at him, blinking more in ten seconds than Crowley usually blinks in an entire day. “Yes. Yes, I think I am. You are—you feel very—” Aziraphale goes to smooth down his waistcoat with the hand that’s not still clinging to Crowley’s, only Crowley doesn’t wear a waistcoat these days, so he just rests his fingers on the lower part of Crowley’s stomach.

Crowley can almost feel it, the way his palm spreads, considering, comforting, close.

Aziraphale looks down at Crowley’s feet. “Oh my.”

“If you say _anything_ about my shoes—”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Aziraphale says, with the air of someone who’ll transform them into slippers the second he’s out of sight. His gaze rises, meets Crowley’s, looking into his own eyes. “There we are, then.”

“It’s—alright?” Crowley says. “The body. You don’t feel too…cramped? I know it’s not as roomy as the one you’re used to. Not as comfortable, probably.”

“It’s fine. And you? It—fits alright?”

Crowley takes a breath, working his shoulders into Aziraphale’s jacket. “Like a glove.”

They look at each other and the world feels entirely still.

“What happens, do you think,” Aziraphale says, quieter, “when Hell comes to get you? Me. Me-you.”

Crowley lifts an eyebrow. “Drag you downstairs. Make a song and dance of it. Swan about talking about treachery and disloyalty and possibly some exaggerated expenses from 1970. Then extinction.”

“Definitely Holy water, you think?”

Crowley nods. “Be my guess. Now they know I’ve been—you know—” He hasn’t been able to say the word ‘fraternising’ for more than 100 years, so he just gestures between them. “They’ll think it’s fitting. Poetic.”

“Last night, you seemed convinced Hastur would spray you with a plant mister of Holy water in vengeance.”

Crowley winces. “Was I? Did I really say that?”

“I have to say I think it’s quite unlikely.”

“Yeah, probably.” Crowley sighs. “And Heaven?” he says. “What are they going to try to do to me?” 

He doesn’t need to ask, really. He knows full well what Heaven is capable of, how they deal with dissenters. He’s not relishing the idea of a do-over but at the same time, having gone through it once, at least he’s unlikely to be surprised by the killer instinct angels are capable of hiding behind measured, rule-abiding eyes. 

“A stern talking to,” Aziraphale says. “And then like Agnes said. Flames. Hellfire. God knows where they’ll find it at short notice.”

“I’m sure they have their sources.”

A quiet unlike any other they’ve shared settles between them.

Last night, it was easy to let the whisky drive them to defiant fury, to revel in the inventiveness of their plan, to talk about sod the sodding angels and blast the blasted demons, they’d both walk in and give them all the fright of their celestial lives.

In the cold, hard light of day, it feels rather different. An audacious idea that will either set them free or damn both of them for all eternity. “We should get going.”

“Be careful, Crowley.”

“You too, Aziraphale.”

They’re still holding hands. Neither of them lets go until they’re outside the door.

* * *

Hell is, as ever, stifling and claustrophobic, the air thick like it’s made from acrid but invisible smog that’s been heated in a microwave for longer than the instructions instructed. Something drips off the ceiling down the back of Crowley’s neck. Crowley wipes at it and snarls at his fingers. Someone has moved his desk right under whatever the drip is and he can’t move it back again because there’s nowhere else to put it without playing Tetris with the entire room. Which is normally what he would do, obviously, but there’s a rumbling that Satan is displeased about something or other so the sooner he gets this paperwork finished and out of here, the better.

He signs his name at the bottom of his spreadsheet of expenses and shuffles the receipts under the stapler. With a thunk, he bundles them together and just misses another drip as he slides out of the chair. It lands on the desktop next to the note from Beelzebub which says his presence is requested, which has been making him jittery since he got here.

The accounting department is down the hall from Demon Operations, beyond a hefty iron door with a sign that says ‘it’s accrual world’ which makes Crowley grit his teeth against a sudden, visceral hatred of everything every single time he comes here. He gives it a cursory knock and sticks his head in. “Only me,” he says.

A face appears from below a landslide of faded receipts. “Crowley!”

Mavis has been here for three centuries and as such, occupies a position in the department hierarchy only slightly lower than the hole punch. They have a grey, square face and jangly earrings made from the skeletons of whole weasels and light up like the illuminated displays humans use for appropriated pagan festivals whenever they see Crowley, for reasons which absolutely escape him.

“Just dropping these off. You well?”

“I am now.” Mavis twirls a weasel skeleton around their finger. “Always so punctual.” Mavis takes his papers and flips through his sheets, nodding appreciatively, before dropping them into an overflowing filing cabinet. “Wish everyone was as diligent as you.”

One of the things which keeps Crowley out of the way of suspicion is the semblance of order and obedience he projects. Essentially it allows him to hide behind the idea that no one would be stupid enough to bend the rules and accurately document it. If anyone were to actually read his files, they’d see he claims for dinners he doesn’t eat and mileage to places he’s no business going, and a bit of him—just a bit of him—always wants to be challenged so he can see whether or not he can lie his way out.

“How’s things?” Mavis says, with a glance at the ceiling. “Up there.”

“Oh, you know,” Crowley says. “Bit drizzly since last Wednesday but it’s supposed to brighten up tomorrow.”

Mavis laughs as if he’s just dropped the killer punchline to a drawn-out stand-up routine.

“So,” Crowley says, leaning on the desk, “what’s this rumbling about Satan throwing a wobbler..?”

Mavis glances at the doorway, then across the room at her colleagues’ grey, bent heads before leaning in. “I heard from Lewood that they heard from Dicknot that the Dark Lord is a bit eggy about this whole Anti-Christ business. Isn’t happy with the way management are handling it.”

“Really. How… eggy are we talking?”

“I don’t know but—” Mavis leans in, washing Crowley with breath that wouldn’t feel out of place in a morgue. “—there’s been a lot of meetings. Sort no one puts in the diary, you know what I mean?”

“Clandestine.”

“Yeah. Dicknot’s beside himself. Set fire to a bin last Tuesday, didn’t even mean to. Stress, it is.”

“Hmm.”

A grey figure comes to a hover in the doorway. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Hastur,” Crowley says, in equally unenthusiastic greeting.

“You’re late.”

Crowley checks his watch.

He’s not.

“I better go,” he says to Mavis. “Nice catching up, though.”

He nods at a few of the others as he moves down the hall, checking every face for smirks that say they spotted him consorting with an angel and the jig’s up. Any one of them would delight in dobbing him in to the council but those who look his way do so with such indifference, he reasons he’s safe enough for now. One thing you can say for demons is they take such pleasure in the impending misfortune of others, their poker faces are terrible.

Beelzebub is waiting in the usual spot near the basement staircase, where demons who haven’t made their quotas can be heard screaming. He’s seen people being dragged in. But no one ever come out. Crowley asked what went on down there once, getting nothing by way of an answer except a leer and a _mind you never find out, Crowley_. He has a theory they’re rooms of pure nothing, blank, dark endless boxes of infinite void, where you dangle, suspended and not falling towards any kind of bottom. Faced with the emptiness, that nothing else will ever happen, anyone placed in there goes quietly—and then loudly—mad.

He tells himself he quite fancies a bit of peace and quiet, that a change is as good as a holiday and all that, but it doesn’t make the screaming any easier to bear.

“Lord Beelzebub,” he says, with a flourish which always seems bit sarcastic, no matter how hard he tries for sincerity.

“Nice of you to join us, Crowley.” The flies swarm to the left as Beelzebub tilts their head and jerks a thumb at the supply cupboard.

Obligingly, Crowley steps inside, turns his back to the shelves where Sharpies endlessly replicate but never have any lids and notebooks that are always the wrong size for your purposes stack high. Something drips on his head. “Is that—is there a… sewage leak of some kind?”

No one answers.

“Shut the door, Hastur.”

Crowley shifts out of the way of the drip, which conveniently puts him just out of arm’s reach of both Hastur and his left-hand man Ligur, who’s appeared from down the hall. He’s not wild about being outnumbered in an enclosed space but he schools his face. “Nice to be back.”

“Really.”

One thing Crowley had to learn—although it was millennia ago now—was not to rise to leading questions or the monotone delivery of simple words stated as if they require a reply.

“Been busy?” Crowley says. The faux-breeziness of his own voice is always a little surprising to him. He leans on a ream of copier paper so cheap it’s almost entirely see-through. Anyone who decides to double-side print that is going to be fuming, assuming they can get Hell’s notoriously belligerent printers to cooperate in the first place.

“As ever.”

“What’s all this I hear about our Lord and Master being unhappy with the way the Anti-Christ is being handled?”

Hastur makes a face like the question has slashed him across the torso. “Where did you hear that?”

Crowley shrugs. “Idle chit-chat, no doubt.”

He watches their faces from behind his glasses. Beelzebub knew. Hastur didn’t. Ligur is mostly trying to keep his chameleon from snagging one of Beelzebub’s flies for a snack.

“He is… impatient,” Beelzebub says, shoving their hands into their pockets.

“Impatient?”

“Like all of us,” Beelzebub says, emotionless, “he’s keen to get on with the war.”

Crowley remembers the drive to Tadfield, the baby crying on the backseat, a jumble of thoughts in his head but mostly the words_ eleven pigging years._ Eleven pigging years, the world was going to end in eleven pigging years. How was he supposed to sort this entire pigging mess out in eleven pigging years? Eleven pigging years! When he finally reached Aziraphale, it’s a wonder he didn’t just shout _eleven pigging years_ and then fall over.

Eleven years was—_is_—no time, no time at all. The weight of the clock that’s already ticked through most of it presses heavily on his chest. But Satan’s impatient. Keen to get on with a war that could cause a mass extinction event on both Heaven and Hell’s sides. The very thought.

“Well we wouldn’t want that,” Crowley says. “Perhaps a distraction could be arranged? A diverting little skirmish..?”

Hastur leans in. Of all the things he really relishes, causing minor conflicts between countries by blowing something up is the one that makes him salivate.

Beelzebub stares at Crowley as if he hasn’t spoken, long and dead-eyed and bored. “Any bad news we could pass along about his child that might…satiate the desire to get things moving?”

Crowley hums in entirely fake thought. Since Aziraphale brought it up, he’s been looking for hints in Warlock’s behaviour and finding none at all.

Well, not none. Warlock steals from his mother’s purse even though everything he could ever want or ask for is provided, hits his friends and then gets annoyed with them for crying, and has a fondness for drawing genitals in books, but it’s hardly the stuff he thought the Anti-Christ would be made of. He keeps looking for the influence of Satan inside him, that flicker of pure evil in his eye that says one day he could extinguish entire cities without pausing to give it half a second of thought, or trigger fireworks made of lava and rain them down on mid-size towns just to see which way people run. But Warlock stopped swearing because Brother Francis asked him to. He’d like to think it could all be attributed to Aziraphale’s influence, but no one knows better than Crowley that Aziraphale isn’t half as made of light as he likes to think he is. It niggles at him, that if ordinary humans can be described as having demons inside them which lead them to do all sorts of untoward things, surely the son of Satan should be showing one or two? And slightly less interest in the fate of the radishes?

Beelzebub and Hastur are staring at him.

“He shows a remarkable aptitude for dissent.”

“Dissent,” Beelzebub echoes.

“Has little love for his largely absent earthly father. Which I’m fostering, of course.”

Beelzebub raises an eyebrow.

“I think he afflicted someone with a plague of spiders.”

Hastur barks a laugh which seems to bounce off all the walls which have ever existed.

“Good lad,” Ligur says. “No, wait. Don’t tell him I said that.”

* * *

Crowley emerges from one of Hell’s side doors back onto Oxford Street amongst swarming, unaware shoppers, with a sense of burgeoning unease. He’s always known there wasn’t much time, that attempting to avert the course of a foretold apocalypse with an experiment in nature vs. nurture was the longest of long shots, but amongst the bustle of the evening, it all feels just a little bit more real.

The end of the world.

He pictures the tomatoes they planted in the greenhouse. They’re starting to really fruit and more plants could be ordered for next year. But in the not too distant future, tomatoes could cease to exist at all.

It’s the thing he could never get his head around when it came to the Great Plan. Why bother? Why build all this _stuff _just to watch it burn? Why go to the effort of having stars spew their nitrogen out into the blackness of space when they die and have that be exactly the same thing tomatoes need to make chlorophyll? Why bother with all this… intricacy just to destroy it in six thousand measly, pigging little years?

A shopper jostles him. Crowley hisses and sends them scurrying into the path of a taxi, narrowly avoiding taking a bumper plate to the shins. “Watch where you’re going,” he mutters. “World’s not ending yet.”

And what about all the humans? So much more intricate and complex than tomatoes.

He tries not to think about what will happen to all the humans if his plan fails, if he fails, but he can’t help picturing them scattering from a giant, angry gash in the ground as demons spill out, spewing fire and ash and century upon century of pent-up malevolence. If Hell had a water-cooler—which it doesn’t, only a break room which is often co-opted for just-in-time ritual sacrifices and the monthly bridge game—the talk round it would be plans for how to create havoc. Everyone has got their pet fantasy.

Everyone but him.

At least, if he doesn’t count the one about packing the Bentley with his and Aziraphale’s things and just… driving. Driving as far away as is possible and then further still, just the two of them.

He makes his way to the bus stop, pictures Aziraphale above, the harsh light of Heaven illuminating his face. He wonders if they’ve heard the rumblings too; secrets between Heaven and Hell are usually few and far between.

There’s an ad in the bus stop for the Samaritans. _Call if you’re despairing. We can help. _

“Can you, though?” he mutters to it. “Can anyone?”

He glances at the roof of the shelter. There’s only one person who can really help. He wants to scream at God to throw a cog in the motion of it all, to say there was a clerical error and it wasn’t 6,000 years, it was 16,000. Or better still 60,000.

Would he feel like he had enough time, then?

As he stands there, waiting for the bus, he realises: it’s not the amount of time which bothers him; it’s the things he hasn’t done with the time he’s already had that are itching under his skin.

* * *

“Well, this is quite exciting.”

They’re standing on the top of a hill, looking out over the glittering London skyline. The trees are in the middle of losing their leaves and the air is crisp but not unpleasantly so, especially after the rancour of Hell.

Crowley glances over at Aziraphale. The air may be clearer in Heaven—and, from what he remembers, scented like a specifically scentless fresh air—but Aziraphale’s demeanour suggests his visit was no more pleasant than Crowley’s was. Whenever he comes back, his eyes move in quick, jerky movements and that scentlessness clings to his clothes, until his own fragrance of lavender and citrus pushes through again, Aziraphale emerging with it. “How was it?”

“Oh, you know,” Aziraphale says, “everyone is terribly busy preparing for inevitable triumph.” Aziraphale tugs down the cuffs of his jacket and straightens his bowtie. “We haven’t been to a concert for ages.”

Behind him, two teenagers in bleeding eyeliner and ripped t-shirts with gaunt, sweaty faces on them stagger into each other, high on anticipation and possibly whatever it is they’re swigging out of their cans.

Crowley indicates that they should go around the building to where the VIP entrance is, and Aziraphale bristles with glee. They navigate the car park and the old, yellow brick TV tower adorned with satellite dishes and aerials and are met by a short snake of barrier and a chipper-looking woman in a neon jacket.

“We’re on the guest list,” Crowley says.

They weren’t.

But they are now.

“Anthony Crowley.”

She strikes through his name on her clipboard and waves a handful of bright pink wristbands at them. “Can I have your wrist, chaps?”

“Oh, a gift,” Aziraphale says, holding his arm out. “How delightful.”

Crowley follows suit and immediately regrets it as the sharp edge of the wristband catches on his skin.

She steps aside. “Have a good evening, guys.”

Chatter washes towards them as they enter the building and Crowley notes that the sound of mass expectation hasn’t changed in two hundred years. Glass bottles clink and people roar with laughter, swells of it rising and falling like a tide from the bars around the outside of the main concert space while huge, swaying palm trees reach up towards the domed glass roof.

Alexandra Palace.

It’s one of Crowley’s favourite buildings in all of England.

When it opened, he wanted to bring Aziraphale, to say forget what happened eleven years ago between us, there’s a palace on a hill that’s filled with tropical plants_. _It was the talk of the town; Aziraphale couldn’t have missed it, but every day that passed without hearing from him brought more doubt about whether an invite would be welcome. Crowley came to the grand opening anyway, checking faces for an impish grin and dancing eyes, and ended up sighing at the truth of the cliché that sometimes, you’re never more alone than when Sims Reeves is singing Handel to a crowd that couldn’t be more packed if they consisted entirely of sardines.

“Gosh,” Aziraphale says, turning in a full circle to take it all in.

Crowley gestures to one of the little wooden stands which serve cocktails. “Drink?”

He gets them two of the specials, one of which has a pink tinge and a cocktail umbrella while the other is violent orange with a cherry speared on a stick. They stroll through the collection of food stalls, where cheesy chips and burritos clamour for attention, to a stall selling wares including the same t-shirt he saw on the girls outside. “Want one?” Crowley says. “Souvenir? It’s a historic occasion, after all.”

“The Lib-er-tines,” Aziraphale says, raising an eyebrow. “That sounds very modern. It’s not going to be too licentious, is it?”

Crowley pushes his grin back inside himself. “Wait and see.”

Inside the hall, it’s dark and the music is almost deafeningly loud, even though no one is on stage yet. The soundtrack rattles through The Small Faces, The Who, and The Jam as people filter in, the front of the stage already swamped by eager fans linking arms, practically tying themselves to the barrier with their own flesh. Crowley picks them a spot further towards the back where they can observe the show and the crowd alike.

Aziraphale hoovers up a mouthful of his cocktail with his straw. “Nice to get out and about for a while.”

“You don’t like playing gardener?”

“Oh no it’s—fine, but I miss the bookshop and my things. Don’t you?”

Crowley stares at the stage. It hadn’t occurred to him to have things to miss. The black curtain rustles with the movement of people and equipment behind it and he twitches his finger to move a flight case from the edge of the stage to the dark stairs. There’s a muffled _ow_ as someone walks into it and a quick squabble about which bastard left that there, but it doesn’t make him feel better.

People cram in around them: to one side, a bunch of lads with almost identical hairdos and military jackets and to the other, a couple with their tongues so far inside each other’s mouths it’s practically medical. What Crowley thought would be an out of the way spot turns out to actually be more or less the middle of the room and they’re squashed together, Aziraphale’s shoulder against his, his smile flickering from expectant to a bit alarmed.

The lights go out.

The crowd roars.

The curtain drops and the band bound out, guitars and drums bursting to life all at once.

And the crowd surges forward, taking Crowley and Aziraphale with them in a rush of elbows and screaming. Crowley has been in less intense revolts. A fist ruffles his hair as someone punches the air between them, using Aziraphale’s shoulder for leverage.

Aziraphale makes a grab for Crowley’s arm.

The sensation seeps through him, like ice melting in the relative heat of whisky. It’d be quite distracting under normal circumstances, but everyone around them is shouting—some of them the words to the song, some of them just endlessly, like the world is ending. Several people are crying and overhead sails a pint of what Crowley really hopes is beer.

It lands with a glance to the back of someone’s head, dispersing the remainder of its contents in a foamy cavalcade. A girl with blonde hair attempts to push between them but rather than standing aside with a little bow as he might do in other circumstances, Aziraphale digs his fingers into Crowley’s arm and clamps to his side. The smile he’s wearing is more of a grimace, plastered on with sheer determination not to be rude. He mouths something that looks a little bit like, “I’m quite certain we’re going to die,” and Crowley tightens his elbow to keep Aziraphale’s hand firmly nestled into him.

The first song rolls straight into the second one and then again into the third. It sends the crowd into a frenzy, rival groups shoving each other until the chorus, when en masse, everyone starts leaping up and down in more or less perfect time.

“What are they doing?!” Aziraphale yells, right into Crowley’s hair. “Are they possessed? Should I intervene?”

Crowley extracts his free hand from the morass and sips at his cocktail. “They’re having fun.”

Aziraphale ducks as a fist flies past again and the girls behind him scream, “Caaaaaaaarl,” as if the word is four years long. “I might never hear in that ear again,” Aziraphale mutters, but he starts bouncing from foot to foot anyway in an attempt to join in, just as the song ends.

The crowd applauds and whoops.

Hugs are exchanged.

On stage, an exasperated looking woman in black scuttles on to do something to a microphone that’s been unceremoniously not put back where it’s supposed to be.

Crowley considers shorting the power just to see if he could cause an actual riot.

Maybe after they’ve done his favourite.

The next song starts with an extended rambling intro, which the crowd take as invitation to rearrange itself at a more sociable distance. Aziraphale makes use of the additional breathing room to adjust his collar and bowtie, which has become delightful skew-if. He catches Crowley’s eye. “You didn’t tell me it would be this… sweaty.”

“I offered to buy you a t-shirt.”

“A t-shirt? Me?!”

Crowley smiles to himself. He can picture it all too well, Aziraphale pottering about the bookshop, at some point in the future when fashion has advanced to such a point where a t-shirt looks to him like Victorian house coats do now.

Assuming the Anti-Christ doesn’t shove them all off the edge of the world and into a pit of boiling tar, that is.

The band move on to a slower number, the crowd singing along at a low, slightly out of tune rumble, and then barrel immediately into another riotous cacophony squashed into a four minute framework.

“When—er—is the intermission?” Aziraphale yells, barely audible even though he’s only inches away.

“There isn’t one,” Crowley yells back and watches dismay land on Aziraphale’s face.

“Might you ask the drummer to drum a little more quietly, then?” he says.

Crowley miracles him some earplugs.

* * *

They spill out onto the hillside between scattered fragments of paper and plastic cups and men yelling the price of their not-entirely-authentic merchandise. The crowd roll off the hill towards the car parks and the bus stops, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders and their hair damp, some singing the chorus from the popular numbers, others shrieking about a moment they want to check everyone else saw, and one guy puking over the side of a fence.

“Well, that was quite an experience,” Aziraphale says, a little too loudly as he pulls his earplugs out.

If Crowley recalls, that’s the same thing he said after the first time Crowley gave him a lift home. Aziraphale clung to the windshield and the dashboard for a full minute after they’d stopped moving and got out as if he expected the pavement not to be there.

It _was_ the Blitz, though, so that was a more valid concern than it might’ve been at other points in history.

They make a path through the crowd to where the Bentley is parked, Crowley relieving it of the shackle of its yellow clamp with a click of his fingers. Aziraphale slides into the passenger seat and leans back against the leather, working his shoulders against the coolness of it with a little wiggle.

“Music?” Crowley says, reaching across him for the glovebox.

Aziraphale’s eyes fly wide. “No,” Aziraphale says, “please no. Just—silence. Let me enjoy the silence?”

They drive back to the bookshop like that. It’s stop-start traffic most of the way, taxis honking at late-night revellers as they fall out of the pubs in Camden and kebab shops lit up with stock photos of their wares. On top of several buildings, red lights flash to indicate to aeroplanes that they’ve recently been erected and cranes hang their arms like they’re tired against the inky sky.

Humans are always building. Probably most of them don’t think of it as an act of hope, as an unspoken belief there will be a future, but it is. He shoots a glance at Aziraphale. He’s surveying the late-night revellers, same as Crowley is, lost in his own thoughts. Crowley wonders what they are.

Eventually, Crowley pulls up outside the shop. Often, late at night, he’s strolled through here, telling himself it’s convenient and interesting for a walk, that he’s more likely to find someone on the edge for a quick, meaningless temptation than he is closer to home. In truth, he comes to see if there’s flickering light behind the windows of Aziraphale’s, countless times has knocked on the pane and shouted, ‘It’s me,’ before Aziraphale has even bothered to toss out, ‘We’re closed.’

Plenty of nights they’ve wiled away, Aziraphale talking him through the plot of some book Crowley didn’t even ask about, Crowley nursing a glass of wine and watching the shape of his mouth when he gets excited. He’s so very not ready for that all to just be… gone.

He kills the engine and looks across at Aziraphale in silent question.

_More? _

_Do you want more of me?_

Sometimes Aziraphale’s face says it’s not a silent question at all. “What a night,” he says, with one of his quiet, half-chuckles.

“Indeed. Not too licentious for you?”

Aziraphale lifts an eyebrow. “Hardly. In fact, I’d have preferred a little more debauchery if it would’ve kept the volume down,” he says. “Early start tomorrow, to drive back to the Ambassador’s?”

“They’re away for the weekend visiting some… visiting diplomat, remember?”

“Oh that’s right,” Aziraphale says, and something hopeful flickers across his face. “Would you care to come in for a nightcap, then?”

* * *

Friday night bleeds into Saturday morning. Crowley wakes in the position which has become customary, on one of the chairs in the back of the bookshop, with his neck at an angle that was a lot more comfortable when he was a serpent. The wine they drank has been squirrelled away along with the glasses, so all that remains of their evening is the wristband Crowley’s still wearing and a faint remembrance that Aziraphale got up to find Crowley a pamphlet and Crowley falling asleep before he returned. He deals with the bracelet first.

Out the front, Aziraphale is on the phone, at length explaining that while he would love to sell whoever it is a copy of _Little Dorrit_, no he doesn’t have an eBay shop and yes he’s perfectly aware what year it is, thank you kindly for checking.

“Do—do be careful with that,” he calls across to the shelves, “it’s a first edition.”

Crowley straightens up out of the chair, working his shoulders until they feel like shoulders again and rearranging his hair into a bun without bothering to lift his hands to see what state of disarray it’s in. He leans on the wall which marks the official start of the shop and the end of Aziraphale’s little nook, watches a guy in his 30s put a book back in what is clearly the right enough place to make Aziraphale wince.

Watching Aziraphale dodge selling books is more entertaining than watching any sport. Sometimes he goes on the offensive, hovering too close to people and peering over their shoulder until they get too nervous and leave, while other times he makes himself so entirely absent that they get bored looking for an assistant to help with their enquiry. Normally, those people leave muttering about buying it online instead, but sometimes, they’ll try to shoplift, only to have the books magically sneak out of their pockets and backpacks and back onto the shelves as soon as they step over the threshold. It’s a game he’s watched dozens—probably hundreds—of times and he never tires of Aziraphale’s anxious skitter across the floor.

“I don’t know why you insist on opening,” he says, as Aziraphale retrieves a book of sonnets from the display that a sticky-fingered child was thinking about touching.

“Because it’s a bookshop, Crowley.” He shelves the volume in _Railway Journeys of the Twentieth Century_, apparently having decided it’ll be safe there. “What would it look like if—” He glances at the ceiling. “—someone stopped by and I was always closed?”

“They’d come up with a salacious version of what they thought you were doing behind closed doors, I expect.”

“Exactly. And that really would not do.”

Crowley was joking but he understands Aziraphale being jittery. They both are. Hard not to be when the seconds of life as you know it are ticking away like a literal time bomb, after which there will be no time, and no bombs, and not much of anything else, either.

He skims the entire shop, gaze catching on the window. They’re new: a vase of lilac roses, sitting in water but still wrapped in brown paper and tied together with an elaborate string bow. “Secret admirer?” he says.

“Pardon?” Aziraphale follows Crowley’s gaze. “Oh. Those are for you, actually.”

Crowley almost falls off the wall. He touches his chest. “_I_ have a secret admirer?”

“Perhaps, how should I know?”

Aziraphale retrieves the flowers, miracling the drips away with a subtle wave, and holding them out.

Crowley takes them in much the same way he imagines a dinner lady might take a proffered device packed with high explosives and coloured wires that’s ominously ticking and proclaiming 15 seconds left on a big dial on the front. “Really?” he says.

He rotates the bunch, looking for a card. For a horrible second, Crowley imagines they might be from Mavis, but Aziraphale waves airily. “There’s no need to look so suspicious. They’re a thank you. For last night.”

Crowley stares at him.

“From me. I thought you might be missing the—the—you know—the—” He waves at the shop. “Great outdoors. Little posy to brighten things up until we return.”

Crowley looks from Aziraphale to the roses and back again. His first impulse is to ask if Aziraphale is alright. If he has a temperature. If there’s a celestial flu going around that he picked up at his meeting.

He doesn’t have a second impulse.

That’s all there is.

That and a blank, sort of existential _what?_

“That’s… very thoughtful,” he says.

Aziraphale smiles and tries to hide it in the collar of his shirt at the same time. “Anyway, best get back to it,” he says, gesturing to a woman with several facial piercings who’s just come in and looks lost. “No rest for the—er—un-wicked.”

Crowley spends the rest of the day in a state of mild disbelief, which isn’t alleviated at all by the dozens of times he looks at the flowers to confirm that yes, they really do exist. Truthfully Crowley has always been a bigger fan of foliage than flowers, but they’re growing on him. As is the desire to return the favour in some way.

He helps Aziraphale distract a customer who comes perilously close to buying a first edition encyclopaedia and then declares, “Just nipping out before the shops close. Want anything?”

Aziraphale shakes his head and dashes off to where an old lady is fingering a volume of poetry. “That is… actually that’s not for sale.”

Soho has a plethora of gift-buying options, but a lot of them would get you arrested in a sleepy village. Crowley ponders a few windows with displays ranging from dildoes to leather masks before deciding he doesn’t want to present Aziraphale with anything that would make him fall off his chair. Not when he’s had such a trying day already.

He strolls amongst the last of the shoppers, toying with flowers in return, but the cart on the corner only has a handful of sad looking carnations left and he remembers the pub, Aziraphale acting as if carnations were deeply offensive. A bow tie, maybe? Too much. He peers into a shop window to look at socks depicting scenes from famous paintings, debating if Aziraphale would find it funny to have _The Scream_ stretched over his toes. He’s about to go in when, in the reflection over his shoulder, the answer appears: a chocolate shop with a freshly-painted sign and window stickers about heavenly flavours and sinful centres.

Crowley crosses the road. Inside the shop, the smell is deep and rich and dirty, like the kind of hot chocolate they served when it first came to Europe’s most exclusive cafes. It pulls at his stomach. Not hunger—or, not hunger for something to eat, anyway. More like desire to go back inside a memory.

The court of Charles V. They were both there to meddle in relations between him and Francis I, only owing to a scheduling error, Crowley arrived two days after Charles had left for Naples and Aziraphale the day after that. Crowley persuaded him to stick around, to sow some seeds of whatever he was there to sow with whichever hangers-on hadn’t been deemed important enough to leave with the royal party. They’d strolled the vast courtyard in the sunshine, looked at portraits of Joanna the Mad and Philip the Handsome, then sampled all the delights Charles’ empire brought from the Andes.

‘And what would you be?’ Aziraphale asked, over the top of his chocolate. ‘Were you named using the same convention employed for poor Joanna?’

‘Crowley the…’

Crowley ran through Wicked, Dastardly, Unforgivable, but sitting there with Aziraphale, he didn’t really feel like any of those things. ‘Cunning?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Charming?’

‘Better.’

‘And you?’

‘Aziraphale the Angelic, of course.’

‘Oh, of course. But say that was off the table. Say it couldn’t be anything to do with Heaven, it just had to be about you?’

Aziraphale set down his cup. ‘How does one separate me from what I am, from Heaven? It’s intrinsic, isn’t it?’

‘You think?’

‘You _don’t_?’ 

The lady behind the counter has plastic gloves and a smile that’s worn out from being used all day. “Can I help you at all?” she says.

Crowley glances around. It’s one of those places with posters on the wall about the quality of their ingredients and how no farmers were hurt during the process rather than stacks of products he could snag and leg it. “Er—chocolates?” he says. “Obviously. It’s a chocolate shop.” He thumbs over his chin. “A… dozen?”

Do people buy chocolates by the dozen? Or is that only roses?

“What kind would you like?” she says, gesturing to the array in the glass cabinet in front of her. She reaches for a little gold box and a set of tongs. “Truffles? Something with a ganache centre? Or we have a selection of lovely fruit creams which have been very popular today?”

She might as well be offering him a choice between fighting a baboon with a toothpick and fighting a giant toothpick with a baboon.

Does Aziraphale like truffles? What’s that fruit he always raves about? What _is_ ganache anyway? You come in to make a simple purchase and people just expect you to know what all these words mean. Crowley grimaces. “Er… I don’t eat the stuff. They’re for… someone else. A gift.”

“Oh,” she says. “Perhaps if you tell me what they like, I might be able to suggest something?”

Crowley grits his teeth but he can’t see a way around it: he’s going to have to accept help.

“He’s—I don’t know—” Crowley gestures irritation at the shop’s sweet air. “Traditional. He likes tradition. Sticky toffee pudding and rhubarb crumble and little tins with tartan bows on the top. He got me lilac roses—I just need something that’s… like that.”

Her expression changes to one of knowing curiosity but she clicks the tongs and leans into the display. “I know exactly the thing,” she says, and zooms in on the tiny, dark chocolate blobs with pale purple chips on top. She moves through the selection, picking up round balls covered in dark chocolate sprinkles, passing over white chocolate with pink half way up the side, adding a small slab of artfully broken chocolate-dipped honeycomb. “Would you like them wrapped?”

“Sure,” Crowley says.

He’s never sounded less sure about anything, but she smiles and says as they’re a special gift, she’ll make them look extra lovely for him.

The chocolates feel obvious, as soon as Crowley’s walking through the streets of Soho with them, as if they’re not a tiny gold box with a ribbon on the top, but a giant blaring arrow marked _feelings, behold my feelings_. He would put them in his pocket but the only thing worse than showing up at the bookshop with a box of ill-advised chocolates is showing up with a pocketful of melted chocolate. He walks past couples meeting and greeting each other with tip-toe kisses outside noodle bars and groups of friends pushing each other through the doors of pubs that don’t look big enough to hold them, feeling at once like he looks like one of them and a total outsider.

First time he brought chocolate for Aziraphale, it was rather harder to come by. He’d had to walk all the way down St James’s Street until he found something suitable and then Gabriel rather ruined his moment by almost sending Aziraphale back to Heaven and necessitating Crowley doing some Burbage-level acting with a shop’s dummy to convince him how needed on Earth for thwarting Aziraphale was. They’d enjoyed it later, sitting on the floor amongst books which still needed sorting, and when Crowley woke up on the bookshop sofa, Aziraphale was staring out of the window, his back turned. Unaware that Crowley was watching, he let his fingers dally over the package, murmuring, “Interesting, isn’t it, the things—the people—one doesn’t want to leave behind, when it comes to it.”

Crowley wondered what he meant, on and off, for the next decade.

When he arrives at the shop, Aziraphale is shooing the last customer of the day out of the door with a promise he’ll be open again three weeks on Wednesday and they can come back then when they’ve made up their mind. He clocks Crowley and makes an expression of utmost weariness. “Gracious,” he says, “I thought today would never end. I had to sell a professor of linguistics a _Don Quixote_ just to get him to leave.”

Crowley hides the little gold box behind his back. “Not an original.”

Aziraphale looks mortally offended. “No, of course not.”

He ushers Crowley inside and flips the sign over to closed. It’s at least eighteen shades more faded than the open side, which does funny things to Crowley’s chest as he recalls all the times they flipped the sign to talk about some _arrangement,_ which invariably led into talking, joking, laughing about nothing in particular at all. Aziraphale bustles about, putting the kettle on and straightening things the customers have left askew before puttering over to the ancient sales register and pressing a series of buttons which make a cog inside turn a drum and spew a paper coil out of the top. Aziraphale reaches for his glasses and hooks them over his ears. “Won’t be a moment. Do help yourself to tea or some cocoa if you’d rather. Or there’s wine in the —”

“I know.”

Crowley slips out the back. He planned to give the chocolates to Aziraphale as if they were exactly what he intended, a little token, no big deal, but the feelings arrow is only more obvious now he’s actually arrived in the moment. He places the chocolates on the arm of one of the chairs, with the tag facing where Aziraphale normally sits, his name in fresh lettering catching the last of the day’s sunlight and the first of the lamplight.

He makes tea for them both and takes Aziraphale’s out to where he’s peering at the coil of paper, his tongue caught between his teeth as he plumbs the numbers into a spreadsheet on his ancient computer.

“You know, you _can_ get machines that do that automatically,” he says, setting the winged mug on the desk. No sugar and just a splash of milk for Aziraphale, the way he’s taken it since they first had tea back in…. Crowley forgets. Long time ago. Bloody long time ago. But like so many things, he knows they did it first together.

“Oh, thank you. You are a dear.” Aziraphale squints at the screen and redoes a line. “I don’t trust them to get the numbers right. Bertha here has been doing them impeccably for years.”

He pats the top of the yellowed monitor like most people would a treasured but slightly unpredictable dog.

Crowley watches him work, sipping at his tea from a souvenir mug from the Coronation. He takes his tea black, no sugar, because he likes his to taste like tea and not cows. He wrinkles his forehead. He’s sure they’ve had that argument. Probably it was here, potentially amongst a stack of new arrivals which needed shelving. Crowley would always put them in the wrong place so he couldn’t be interpreted as helping, and then one day Aziraphale realised that was it: the perfect way to ensure no customer actually found what they were looking for. So many nights they’ve spent here, listening to music on Aziraphale’s gramophone, lapsing into soft, warm silence when it’s gone midnight and all the bars start to close.

“Did you find what you needed?” Aziraphale says, unhooking his glasses and reaching for his mug.

“What?”

“At the shop.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Did you see there’s a new chocolate shop, just over the road?” Aziraphale says.

“Oh, is there?”

“I keep meaning to call in. See if they’ve got anything for a little pick-me-up when things are hectic. There’s something so soothing about the smell of chocolate, don’t you think?”

Crowley drains his tea and swills the mug out in the butler sink. Soothing. Right. That’s exactly how he feels. Soothed.

There’s a creak as Aziraphale gets up from his chair and Crowley knows from the sound that he’s leaning over the desk to take down a binder, in which he’ll file the till roll which he’s inscribed with the date and totals in perfect cursive script.

“You know,” Crowley says, drying his hands on a tartan tea towel, “I came by one of the first ever boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolates. 1868, it was. Heart-shaped. Quite restrained, by today’s standards. Richard Cadbury put them together for me himself.”

“You had someone to give them to?” Aziraphale says, with some surprise.

Crowley tosses the towel over the edge of the sink and busies himself on one of the shelves, as if looking for something vitally important he filed by accident amongst the section vaguely identified as _leisure pursuits_. Why did he start talking about this? Hell, why did he start _thinking_ about it?

“Might’ve,” he mutters. “I don’t know, really.”

And he didn’t.

That was why they remained un-given.

Aziraphale hums. “Can you?” he says. It’s quiet, as if he’s distracted, making small talk, but there’s something a bit too pinched about his tone to be believably casual. “Love, I mean? As a demon?”

Crowley fiddles with a volume on fly fishing that he assumes has been shelved by mistake in the right location. The spine is cracked in several places, the letters that spell out JR Hartley bisected by broken lines. He pulls the book down, thumbing through it as if he too might want to fish for flies, or whatever this is about.

In fact, he nearly says that. Nearly derails this whole thing with a question about if flies fish, because well, that would be contrary to everything he’s known about the food chain.

The truth is, he’s not sure if he can love. And there’s no one to ask. He can hardly go to Hastur and ask how love is supposed to feel, if the thing burning in his chest is the proper way to do it, if thinking about someone, wishing every second they aren’t there that they were and then when they are, for them to disappear immediately to save you the pain of looking at them, is the way love is supposed to go.

Long ago, he was suffused with love. He breathed it and created it and exuded it without trying. But that’s very different to having it to direct at one person, it bouncing off them and back at you like a great big dog made of rainbows and candy floss and feelings of gross, growling inadequacy.

Of one thing he is certain, though. “I can want.”

The words land the way truth always does, in a space entirely of its own creation that sucks the air out of the room to use in exchange for its summoning. He daren’t look at Aziraphale, but in the shop window, his reflection rocks back on its heels and then forward again, almost as if he’s about to clutch at the desk for support.

Crowley’s imagination has stitched them both into books and films and songs about wanting, but the thing is, he has no idea what it would be like if he and Aziraphale touched. Really touched, with an intention beyond stopping the other from walking into a puddle or arguing the toss over a bottle of red wine. Demons don’t pair up. Don’t trust each other enough, would always be seething in latent suspicion or looking for an angle to get ahead, somehow. And angels can, but don’t either, usually, too concerned with propriety and devotion to the Almighty.

Or that’s what they claim it is. More likely they’re more like demons than any of them would ever admit.

So humans are the only reference point. And Satan below, you can’t move for humans at it. He’s watched couples in the park and on the streets of Soho kissing and giggling and stumbling into each other as if the whole endeavour has made them too giddy to stay on their feet. They’re everywhere from posters for breath mints to the back seat of the bus, locking themselves into each other’s clutches like the most willing of prisoners. It’s little wonder they’ve got no time for anything else, like avoiding the machinations of a demon sticking 50ps down outside Burger King.

Kissing looks nice, though, he thinks. He’s thought about trying it; been propositioned for more than that more times than he could count. But they were all too young, too fragile, too unprepared to hear the truth about who Crowley is. And what would they have talked about? ‘Oh hey remember the Black Death? No of course you don’t, you can’t even remember what happened last Thursday on _EastEnders_.’

On the other side of the bookshop, Aziraphale takes a noisy breath. The kind that’s more like a mic tap to make sure Crowley’s listening.

“And… pray tell, what do you want? Precisely?”

Crowley looks up, then.

The reason he didn’t kiss any of the people who expressed an interest is he had a feeling that with them, it would just have felt like mouths.

“What I’ve always wanted,” he says, unabashedly locking their gazes, just to prove to himself that he can.

He doesn’t want Aziraphale the way that humans want each other. He doesn’t want Aziraphale to coo and kiss his neck and say _I love you_. He wants far more than that. He wants to hear _I know you love me_, proof that he can do it, that what he thinks is love _is_ love, that it’s perceptible to someone who really knows what love is supposed to feel like.

Aziraphale swallows, face all caution, words barely loud enough to count. “And what’s that?”

“To know.”

“To know?”

“To know,” Crowley says, sliding the book on fly fishing back into its home.

He can’t blame Aziraphale for asking questions, but he also can’t deny that not having definitive answers, to these questions in particular, makes him feel as if he’s been eviscerated by his own failings. He traces the book’s spine with the tip of his finger.

What if, inside each tiny crack is a universe of its own? That’s the thing about universes. There are an infinite number of them, small and large and sprawlingly medium, and inside each of them are planets and dust motes and particles, all dancing around each other in a countless array of patterns and bound by a boundless number of rules.

Unfathomable.

It’s all unfathomable.

Even to he who had a part in creating swathes of it.

He looks across at the lilac roses. He has no clue what any of it means, but especially not those.


	3. Ghost Star

They leave the Ritz buzzing on bubbly, tossing around jokes about what on Earth they’re both going to do now they’re technically unemployed. The streets are bustling with shoppers and the first of the commuters dashing home for the evening and they walk elbow to elbow past the shop fronts and bars with box hedge outside, past groups of smokers making small talk and harried assistants shouting into phones, past humans in suits striding with purpose and sitting drinking coffee with nothing else to do. It feels strange, but not unpleasantly so, not to have a destination, a grander purpose to move towards.

Or at least it does until a thought manifests in Crowley’s head: will they see each other, now, when one of them has to instigate it, if they both have to choose it for no reason other than wanting to?

“Maybe I’ll train as a doctor,” Aziraphale says.

“Long hours,” Crowley says, with a wince. “And technically you can already do the important bit.”

“What about you?”

Crowley shrugs. “Just going to go freelance, I think.”

“A freelance demon?”

“Yeah, why not? Know I’m good at it.”

Aziraphale smiles, in perfect step beside him. “The other demons did all seem rather scared of you.”

“They did?” Crowley looks across at him in surprise.

“Or not scared, perhaps,” Aziraphale says. “More… wary. As if they were used to you being unpredictable.”

Crowley shoves his hands into his pockets. “That’s me. Predictably unpredictable.” They reach the corner and slow down to wait for the lights at the crossing to change. “And you?” Crowley says. “Were _you_ scared?”

“You know I thought I would be,” Aziraphale says, “but then I remembered that _you_ wouldn’t be, that you’d walk in convinced in your ability to outwit them, certain it would work.”

“Is that how you think of me?”

The green man beckons them across. Aziraphale tucks his hands against his stomach. “You said it yourself, it’s a confidence game.”

Crowley murmurs vague agreement.

“You know I think I’m too giddy to go home,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley doesn’t really want this to be over, either, not least because whatever happens with them next will be intrinsically different and he finds he wants to cling, just a little bit, to how things are, how they’ve always been. “How about a drive, then?”

Instinctively, he braces for a brush off, but Aziraphale smiles. “That sounds most agreeable.”

The Bentley is parked where Crowley expects it to be, despite Aziraphale not having left it there, and they putter through the early evening traffic, marvelling at all the humans going about their daily business as if nothing untoward happened: the commuters racing for the Tube, not knowing how close they came to there being no Tube at all, the schoolchildren fighting their way onto buses with musical instruments not knowing four of their peers effectively saved the world, the shoppers spending their hard earned cash on frivolities and ephemera which might, in circumstances only slightly to the left, have never existed at all. Crowley sticks to the city rather than heading out into the countryside, feeling instinctively that they both want to be here, to surround themselves with as much humanity as possible.

They take a circuitous route and end up at Primrose Hill.

“Cupcake?” Crowley says, pointing just over the steering wheel. “There’s a little place just over there.”

“I’m stuffed,” Aziraphale says. “How about a stroll?”

Crowley squeezes the car into an unfeasibly tight space out the front of one of the fancy houses with a yellow door and bay trees on either side of the steps. They cross the road and go into the park itself, follow the perimeter, past a clump of trees where dog walkers lose balls in piles of fallen leaves, and take a leisurely pace down the hill itself and then back up again as the sun falls below the city skyline. They locate a bench with a view, and sit for a while, pointing out dog walkers and joggers the other might find amusing, delighting in human stories that wouldn’t have existed had things gone another way.

After everything, it seems almost startlingly normal. Crowley accepts it as he would a dream, as if it all makes sense now but might also fritter away with the flutter of his own eyelashes. Can it possibly be real that a few scant hours ago, Crowley was sitting on a bench in another park, waiting to see Aziraphale emerge from Hell? Could it possibly be true that Aziraphale pulled off deceiving the most suspicious and conniving demons who’ve ever existed?

Well, all but one of them, at least. 

He’s never felt anything quite like the thing which flickered through him in the moment he realised they were both safe. It was entirely beyond words. And now here he is, watching a man in a ridiculous stripy jumper throw a ball for a lolling white pitbull and a small black pug with an underbite.

* * *

The stars are out in force once it gets dark, although Crowley knows that thinking such things is a human affectation, that the stars are there whether or not you can see them, that they don’t go in and come out so much as do their own thing without bothering about who is looking at them.

Great thing about stars, their indifference. He always thought so, even when he moved amongst them. They might be composed of a lot of the same elements as plants, but they behave completely differently. You can’t scare a star into doing what you want it to, because all stars contain within them the knowledge of their own demise. They might not be cognisant the way an angel or demon is, but they have enough fatalism to resist intervention once created. Stars have a determination to do whatever their physics says they must: die, implode, whatever. Plants, meanwhile, scrabble for any chance—however dim—to carry on living. They will tolerate almost anything in exchange for the faintest promise of water and food.

Crowley looks at the guy in the stripy jumper, throwing a ball even though his dogs have given up. Humans are interesting. They have instinctive self-preservation and the will to self-destruct in equal measure. Kid themselves, sometimes, that one thing is the other. Crowley can see himself in all of them—human, plant, and star—but perhaps it’s not surprising to feel kinship for the things with which you’ve been surrounded, to not be sure where those things end and you begin. 

“Lovely night,” Aziraphale says.

“I suspect they’ll all seem lovely for a while.”

“Quite. What is it philosophers say about only knowing the value of things when you’re about to lose them?”

Crowley shifts on the bench. “Or when you think you’ve lost them.”

He’s been trying not to think about the bookshop, to avoid the image of himself with his knees in broken glass, to forget about the cruel, scorching flames climbing the shelves, about the cacophonous throbbing of his heartbeat which roared louder than any inferno ever would. Going there today, even touching the unharmed surfaces, he couldn’t avoid the memory of how the word _no_ became a thousand year litany and he instantly bargained whatever remained of his soul to whoever would take it to bring Aziraphale back. He thinks he’ll be not thinking about it for some time; not thinking about it in that way that it’ll be there behind his eyelids whenever he closes them.

“Which one is Alpha Centauri again?” Aziraphale says, scanning the sky.

“You can’t see it from here, but—” Crowley leans in and points up at a star, his breath clipped as their arms brush. “You see that bright bastard, right there? Sirius? It looks a bit like that. At least it does from here. Up close, world of difference.”

Aziraphale hums. “Why that one? When you asked me to—to go, to go away with you, why there?”

Crowley sniffs. “No reason.”

“There _is_.”

“Lots of spare planets.”

“There are spare planets everywhere and some a good deal closer, I might wager.”

With a sigh, Crowley folds his arms. “It would’ve just felt like home, that’s all. Or not home—not _home_ home—not full of knickknacks and houseplants but… familiar.”

“You’ve been there before? If you know what it looks like, up close?”

“I—er—” Crowley stumbles over the words.

It’s a simple enough thing: _before I did what I did that got me expelled from Heaven, I was up there balling gas and setting things spinnin_g. But he doesn’t really talk about the time before he fell with Aziraphale. He doesn’t talk about it with anybody. Except that one time with Satan, where he laughed about it, and Crowley had to pretend he thought it was hilarious too. _Oh yeah, ripped from the things I’d created and tossed into burning sulphur, what a laugh._

But things are changing.

Things _have _changed, haven’t they?

If Crowley wants the things he thinks he wants, he should be honest with Aziraphale, shouldn’t he, about the things he was, the things he is. And besides, he has no idea, really, what Aziraphale was doing before the garden, either. Too scared to ask, maybe, in case the righteous fury Crowley thought beyond him was just buried deep down.

Aziraphale has always puzzled him that way. Why would God give a flaming sword to someone She knew wouldn’t use it, unless that was the point? But if that _was_ the point, why send a guard at all? Is Aziraphale exactly who God thought he was, or very much not at all?

But it’s not about Aziraphale. Not right now. He has to start with himself.

Sometimes when Crowley’s about to say something difficult, he stares at the most mundane, banal thing he can find, which in this instance is a rusty nail in the seat of the bench. “—sort of built it,” he says, quietly enough that Aziraphale might not even be able to pick it out. “That whole area.”

“You—you what?”

Crowley’s not looking because the nail is_ fascinating_, but he can tell Aziraphale has fully swivelled his head to stare right into Crowley’s temple.

“It was no big deal,” he says, “it’s certainly no Dolphin Nebula. I’ll admit that—at first—I thought shaping them after animals was cheesy but you’ve got to respect the craftsmanship that went into the Dolphin Nebula. And how much more relatable they are, then. Humans didn’t even bother coming up with any myths about Alpha Centuri. Except for one where Hercules accidentally shoots a centaur and Zeus shows up and says, here you go. Sky paddock. And you know what Alpha Centauri is in that myth? The hoof. The bleeding hoof. Behold, my great work, the hoof of a nameless centaur in one of the very, very lesser-known myths.”

Aziraphale switches his focus between the sky and the side of Crowley’s head. “I—you can’t truly believe creating Alpha Centauri is insignificant?”

Crowley’s heart pounds.

Maybe he should tell Aziraphale about the nail, because while they’ve been sitting here, he’s written it an entire history from iron ore through the blacksmith’s hammering to a century of use to here, now, witnessing this conversation. “I mean the ancient Egyptians built temples that point to it, which was nice I suppose, but when you’re building stuff, sometimes you just need a fixed point to aim at, you know? Keep everything square. Or in their case, pyramid shaped. Do you want to get a kebab? I fancy a kebab.”

“Don’t try and change the subject.”

“Not, I’m just… peckish.” Crowley hugs his chest in a way that potentially looks a little more petulant than he intended. “Was just a job. Get up there and… create some stuff.”

“What an extraordinary thing to have done and not tell me about.”

Crowley looks at him, one eyebrow raised. “Believe me, angel, there are plenty of things I’ve done and not told you about.”

“Well I daresay that’s true. But a star, Crowley.”

“Three, actually.” Crowley rolls his eyes at himself. “Not that it matters.”

“Three?!”

“Two main ones and then a tiny little red dwarf.”

“Fancy that.”

Crowley shifts his shoulders, trying to adjust to the feeling of Aziraphale knowing this about him. “If we were on the other hemisphere,” he says, “I could show you my nebula.”

Aziraphale’s expression is so soft, it makes Crowley feel dangerously reckless.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, and even after all this time, he’s awed by just the thought of that. “It’s full of stellar winds, lots of cold hydrogen—spews out baby stars like nobody’s business. Also quite bright, as it happens. Always liked bright. If you’re going to build a nebula, don’t mess about.” He chances a glance over. “ ‘Course, everyone else just thought I was showing off, wanted the humans to identify mine first.”

“Did you?”

“If I cared about that, I probably would’ve helped them find it a bit faster. Name it after me. Crowley Nebula’s got a ring to it, don’t you think?”

Aziraphale smiles. “Is there anything of yours we can see from here?”

Crowley shakes his head, tightens his arms around himself, hoping Aziraphale won’t notice, won’t be able to put it together, that there’s a reason Crowley stays—for the most part—in Europe and above the Equator.

A long moment—one Crowley could build a star in—passes, before Aziraphale folds his hands in his lap and leans in, bumping Crowley’s shoulder with his. “Perhaps we can take a trip, one day,” he says.

Crowley’s not sure if he means to the south of the planet to look at his stars, or to the stars themselves.

“Could you have made any of it habitable? If I’d said yes?”

Crowley shrugs. “Enough for us, probably. Didn’t really think it through that far though, if I’m honest. It was just out of the way of danger.”

A look crosses Aziraphale’s face that he can’t parse.

Crowley pictures them both on the surface of a star. No matter if it’s bright one or a red dwarf, they’d have looked pretty ridiculous, wafting about without all the human trappings to which they’ve both become accustomed. “Thing about kicking back in a nebula, though, is… it’s very inconvenient. I’m talking light years and light years from anything. It is a hell of a long way if you want to get a take away.”

Aziraphale chuckles and leans into his arm. “But do they have Sondheim in the Crowley Nebula?”

“For you,” Crowley says, and a second later he wonders if he’s over stepped, given too much away, but Aziraphale just smiles again.

“Well I never. Six thousand years and there are still things I don’t know about you.”

“It was just a job.”

“It was galaxies, Crowley.”

“Yeah but someone’s got to build them. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. Very fiddly, galaxies. Lots of calculations. Took me a fair few to get it right. Where d’you think all those spare planets came from?”

Aziraphale looks at him, head tilted to one side, and something in his face is at once new and the summation of all the ways he’s looked at Crowley, ever. “Would you like to drive me home?” he says.

* * *

The drive back to the Ambassador’s on the outskirts of the city is noticeably devoid of mention of the chocolates. Crowley wonders if Aziraphale found them, or if he’ll return in a few weeks to find they’ve rotted a hole in the arm of his favourite chair.

Does chocolate rot?

It’s organic. Must do.

Eventually.

Maybe the box would contain it.

But that was organic too, wasn’t it? Farmers, eco-friendly, all that.

Crowley sighs over the steering wheel. Sometimes he wishes he could magic his own brain an off switch.

“Put some music on? Fill the void?” he says, nodding in the vague direction of the glove box.

Aziraphale looks over from where he was staring out of the window. “Sorry, was I not being good company?”

“I’m just… thinking too loudly. Too much. Too… something.”

Aziraphale opens the glove box and catches the handful of CDs which make a break for it. “What would you like?” he says, juggling a compilation called Calming Classics with a Florence & The Machine album and The Best of INXS.

“Doesn’t matter. It’ll turn into Queen anyway.” 

They pull into the long, sweeping driveway sometime in the mid-afternoon. The Dowlings are scheduled to arrive a little before teatime, and the absence of security and vehicles out the front suggest they’ve beaten them to it. Aziraphale heads into the greenhouse to check on the tomatoes while Crowley goes inside to make sure Warlock’s bedroom is the particular kind of messy it should be for a boy of his age.

The Dowlings announce their arrival by slamming the front door open and then closed again shortly afterwards. Shouting echoes down the hallway’s polished wooden flooring and up the walls decorated with photos of inanely grinning senators with their arms around even more inanely grinning ambassadors.

Crowley hates those photos. He caught Warlock drawing crayon penises on the glass of a few of them and didn’t even stop him. If anything, the phalluses in Off-the-Wall Orange and Pinkest Pink were an improvement.

He pastes on his stern smile and goes out to greet them, even though Mrs Dowling is screaming, “Why, Tad, why can’t you just care like a normal husband?!”

Crowley hovers at the top of the stairs, near where two security guards are avoiding each other’s eyes and muttering into the sleeves of their identikit jackets, even though there’s nothing happening on their radio channel. Warlock is peeling the wallpaper behind an eagle statue with a truculent expression.

“Warlock, don’t,” Mrs Dowling says.

The ambassador’s face is ruddy with breathing hard. “Goddamnit, leave that alone.”

“Why?” Warlock says.

“Because I goddamn said so.”

“Leave _him_ alone, Tad.” Mrs Dowling hurls her handbag at the coat rack, noting Crowley watching them. “Oh thank God you’re here,” Mrs Dowling says. She trots halfway up the staircase before leaning in, lowering her voice, “he has been a _nightmare_.”

Crowley offers her a thin smile, assuming she means Warlock. “I’ll take him to his room,” he says, and beckons Warlock up the stairs.

The Dowlings start another round before the bedroom door is even closed. Whatever the original argument was about, this one is about the wallpaper and how they each think the other is responsible for the terrible parenting which led to the peeling of it. Back and forth they go with the _you’re never here!_ and the _so how can it be my fault he behaves like this?_

Technically, on Mondays they do Geography. Crowley takes Warlock through the formation of lakes and how lightning is hail and rain colliding, but it’s late, and Warlock’s kicking his shoes into the corner, so Crowley hands him a colouring book instead. It’s full of drawings of dungeons and people with their innards hanging out and skirts the boundaries of what’s educational and what’s a niche kind of porn, but Warlock likes it.

An hour later, the chef—a stout woman with spiky hair and a broad Brummie accent—brings them a plate of sandwiches. “Hark at them,” she says, gesturing with her thumb down the hall, to where Mr and Mrs Dowling are now engaged in a battle of insults that threatens to rage longer than the Persian-Roman wars. “What is a harpy anyway?”

“Sort of… bird with the head of a woman,” Crowley says. “Partial to acts of kleptomania, particularly when it comes to food items. I’m honestly not sure how it applies, here.”

The chef raises an eyebrow. “Right racket if you ask me.” She peers into the room, where Warlock is furiously colouring outside all the lines. “Anything else I can get for you and the little ‘un, ‘fore I bugger off?”

“We’ll be fine, but thank you.”

Crowley shuts the door after her and places the sandwiches on the desk. Warlock’s flipped the page to a drawing of a 19thth Century prison ship. “Well that’s inaccurate,” Crowley says, pointing to a prisoner with a murderous leer who’s clutching the bars of his top deck cell. “The worst prisoners—those deemed of the poorest character—were kept in the bowels of the ship. To get to the top deck, he’d have had to demonstrate remorse and moral fibre. Does he look like he’s demonstrating remorse and moral fibre?”

Warlock looks up. It’s the most attention he’s paid Crowley since they got back. 

“Awful places, they were,” Crowley says, taking one of the tiny seats at the desk. “Get herded onto them and set sail for who knows where. Lot of the prisoners had no clothes, no shoes, several different diseases. And as if it weren’t enough, they built chapels on the things. Imagine that. Half-starved and delirious with syphilis and you’ve still got to go to church and be thankful for things. Talk about cruelty.”

He sighs. Humans have always been able to out-do him when it comes to foisting horror upon each other. He offers Warlock the plate. “Ham or cheese, dear?”

Warlock takes the ham.

They spend the evening colouring and watching cartoons on Warlock’s iPad until it’s time for bed. Warlock doesn’t complain about his bath or brushing his teeth, settles into bed quietly and quickly while Crowley fetches him a glass of water from the bathroom and turns off the main light in favour of the lamp.

“Nanny?”

“What is it, dear?”

Warlock shifts under the covers. “What does it mean when two people argue all the time?”

Crowley comes to a halt in the middle of sorting the washing from Warlock’s case into the laundry basket. “That can mean a lot of things.”

“My mom says sometimes two people love each other but they just get on each other’s nerves.”

“Does she.” Crowley offers the boy a thin smile as he puts a jumper in the basket and sits down next to the bed.

“She said sometimes people just let other people down. That they don’t appreciate all the things someone else does for them and that they suck balls. Is that true?”

Crowley looks to the window for an answer.

It doesn’t have one, but thankfully Warlock goes on, voice low like he’s sharing a secret. “Do you have a boyfriend, Nanny?”

Crowley forms several words and nearly chokes on each of them, one after the other.

“That means you do,” Warlock says, not un-smugly.

“I—er—” Crowley says. “I have… a friend. Good friend. Best friend, really.”

“Is that the same?”

Having been around humans for almost six thousand years, it’s something of a surprise that a miniature one can poleaxe him with a question. Then again, precious little of his demonic career thus far has had anything to do with Crowley’s love life. Crowley makes another series of noises, none of which are actual words in any known human language, before throwing out, “Well, that’s—that would be—er—a matter for the people… involved, I’d say.”

“How?”

“How…?”

Crowley trails off, frowning, puffing out his cheeks. What would Mary Poppins do? He runs various scenarios, but he can’t see how a spoonful of sugar or some whistling is applicable, here. Heaven, he’s on his own.

“You see,” Crowley says, “all relationships are different. Different as the people who are in them, really. Some people, they… they want companionship. And that’s very much like being friends. And other people, they want to do other, more… physical things.”

“Like tennis?”

“Yes,” Crowley says, with some relief. “Oh yes, very much like tennis.”

“My dad hates tennis,” Warlock says, “but he plays it with the President and yells at the ball anyway.” He snuggles down on his pillow, pulling the duvet up to his chin. “I think mom should’ve married a friend and not dad.”

Warlock says it with such weary resignation, Crowley leans in and fusses with his pillow, but all that does is make Warlock look up at him with big, doleful eyes. “Do you think they love each other? Or will they get a divorce?”

“Who’s to say.”

“Melissa’s parents got divorced and she cried about it all the time.”

Crowley lets his fingers stray to Warlock’s hair, just for a moment.

Warlock sighs. “They did get her a pony to make up for it, though.”

“Well,” Crowley says, “I don’t have a pony, but would you like a song, dear?”

He waits until Warlock has been asleep for almost an hour before dimming the night light, clearing the sandwiches, and slipping out of the room and down the hall.

Downstairs, there’s an eerie silence, punctuated only by the canned laughter on a TV show no one is actually watching. Mrs Dowling is sitting in the kitchen with a large glass of wine, staring at her own reflection in the French windows. Mr Dowling retired to his study a while ago with the slam of the door and a final word about how no one was complaining when they were on the private jet back from Cannes.

Crowley takes the window seat so he can look over the grounds to Aziraphale’s little cottage. He does this, sometimes, sits and looks at the stars and the lights from where Aziraphale is no doubt reading or soaking his feet in a washing up bowl, because he finds the wellies unbearably uncomfortable.

‘Miracle yourself some bigger ones,’ Crowley always says.

‘It’s not the size, it’s the… rubberness. They really are the Devil’s work.’

The memory fades out. Beyond the glass, the trees sway gently as if doing a particularly sedate dance. Normally Crowley finds comfort in the quiet darkness here, but he can’t get Warlock’s question out of his head.

Is a best friend and a boyfriend the same?

Is it?

What would the difference be, really, between being friends and… some other word? Is there a line that, once crossed, can never be hopped back over? And if so, what is it?

Buying chocolates?

Receiving flowers?

Or is it about intention? A friend might buy another friend flowers, flowers of apology or comfort for ill-health or grief, so is it only if you buy them with the intent of them being romantic that they become so? Can the other person always tell? Feel the intent even if nothing is said?

The person he’d normally discuss this with is Aziraphale, but how would he even broach a subject like that without it being obvious what he was really talking about?

No sooner has Crowley brought him to mind than there’s an ethereal tinkling sound, and Aziraphale appears at the doorframe. He takes a quick glance down the hall. “Can I—” He gestures to the room. “—would it be alright if I came in?”

“Yes,” Crowley says, sitting up a little, “of course.”

Aziraphale closes the door, sealing them in.

It’s not Crowley’s space—it’s not even really Nanny Ashtoreth’s space—but still it feels intimate to be in here, together. Like he’s showing Aziraphale a part of himself he’s never seen before. Aziraphale runs his gaze along the bedside table, where Crowley’s props are: a book he borrowed from Aziraphale which has moors and a sad-looking heroine on the cover and felt appropriately Nanny-ish; a photo of a Welsh terrier, stock image which Crowley had framed to hint at a life; and a tin of hand cream which smells like lavender and he’s become unironically attached to. There are other accoutrements scattered around the place: the hat Crowley wears for more formal occasions; a pair of heeled boots which lace all the way up to his knee; an actual carpet bag because he couldn’t resist it. Everything in here has been chosen to project an image. At the same time, he chose them to project it, so they are him as much as anything. As Aziraphale takes it all in, it gives Crowley a sensation of being peeled.

“I’ve something of a moral quandary,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley waves to indicate Aziraphale can sit if he wants. “Go on?”

Aziraphale looks around for other options before perching on the corner of the bed and folding his hands in his lap. “Do you think it would be… overstepping to do something for the Dowlings?”

“What sort of thing are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure. But they do fight a lot,” Aziraphale says, with a sad collapse of his forehead. “It’s not a healthy environment for a child. And they do say, don’t they, that a broken home can be the foundation on which children build a life which strays from the path God has intended for them.”

“Do they?” Crowley tucks one foot up against the side of the window seat.

It’s started raining. Droplets cling to the glass, obscuring the view to the cottage, which means the only thing to look at is the reflection of Aziraphale on Crowley’s bed.

“You must’ve seen it,” Aziraphale says. “All that anger and resentment, it has to go somewhere.”

“Plenty of people commit evil deeds without their parents screaming at each other,” Crowley says. “Plenty of people with awful parents don’t put so much as a toe out of line.”

“I know. I just… don’t want to take any chances. It’s rather important, isn’t it, that I get this right. More important now than ever.”

Crowley scrutinises his distorted reflection, but he can’t tell what he means.

Aziraphale swallows. “It’s just that I don’t normally interfere in personal relations. Sort of… out of scope.”

“What would Heaven say if you did? Could you claim it was for the benefit of the child? Keeping him from anger and darkness?”

“I’ve no idea. Truth be told, they don’t really care much about the child.”

He sounds pained but resigned, and a kernel of loathing forms in Crowley’s stomach. They should all be clamouring to protect Warlock from his destiny, but protecting children has never been Heaven’s thing. In fact, using a child as a pawn in a celestial game is exactly what he should’ve expected from them.

Kids have always been a sticking point for him. How can anybody believe in the benevolence of Heaven—of God when She lets so many children suffer? If Crowley put his mind to it for a decade, he couldn’t come up with half the cruelty and injustice you’d see on any children’s ward, let alone out there in the wilds of various poverty-stricken or war torn countries, where malnutrition and preventable diseases fester on the very streets, feeding on indifference. What kind of creature would create parasites that specifically send children blind or diseases which turn their bones to mush while they’re still inside them? No one in Hell is taking the credit for that stuff. It bothers him, how many tiny horrors God might’ve inflicted in the name of testing humanity. Testing what? The ingenuity of their cures? The depth of their resilience? Couldn’t God just content herself with watching TV shows where they squirt each other with custard and accidentally fall face first into rivers fully clothed?

Aziraphale sighs. “I rather fear it might be up to me. I’m just not very good at, you know, taking initiative. I don’t suppose you could…?”

Crowley swivels to look at him. Aziraphale’s face is imploring, and far harder to look at than it was as a reflection. “Could what?” Crowley says. “Mend a marriage with my demonic powers? That’s not really how it works. Can you not… I don’t know… make them feel lovey-dovey towards each other?”

“I could remind them of the other’s good qualities or fill their heads with dreams about each other, make sure they win a lovely weekend away in Paris,” Aziraphale says, lifting his hands in a shrug. “But they just returned from a trip together. I can’t control how they respond.”

“Love is based in individual will,” Crowley murmurs.

“Quite. I’m not even sure attempting anything would be right.”

“How do you usually know what’s right or wrong?”

“Well they tell me,” Aziraphale says, glancing at the sky, lowering his voice as if the word ‘they’ might summon Michael and a gift basket of hell fire. “There are leaflets.”

“But there are some things you disagree on,” Crowley says. “Some things they—” He copies the lowered tone, the glance up. “—said to do which you didn’t, and some they said not to which you did. You’ve done what you felt was right before, regardless of what Heaven would think.”

The bed creaks as Aziraphale shifts, like Crowley has just accused him of something heinous. “What do _you_ think is right?”

“I’m hardly the authority, here,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale rearranges his trousers over his knees. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t value your input.”

The words do funny, burning things to Crowley’s chest.

It’s not like he has many ideas, though. Demons don’t interfere much in interpersonal relationships either. Not much point, really, when humans make such a meal of it themselves. Sure, a demon might approach a powerful person and whisper in their ear about an assignation which would further their ambition or lurch someone towards an act of reckless jealousy, but Crowley’s never seen the value in it, when there are so many other ways to achieve the same thing that are more fun for him and less ethically dubious.

“What if, rather than interfering in the Dowling’s marriage,” Crowley says, “we just… let Warlock know that scary things sometimes happen, but they can be survived?”

“You think that’s enough?”

Crowley leans back against the window. The more time he spends with Warlock, the more he feels as if there’s no way to prepare a human for life, that even trying—setting out to do it with a purpose—is doomed to failure, because the things you most need to prepare for are the ones it’s impossible to predict.

“Have to be, won’t it? Besides, it’s a lesson he’s going to have to learn at some point.” He looks at the wall, beyond which Warlock is sleeping with a stuffed dinosaur and Crowley’s song in his head. “You know, he asked me earlier if I had a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend?”

Crowley nods. He thinks perhaps he expected Aziraphale to laugh, now they’re in the moment and he hasn’t.

“Little early, isn’t it, to be taking an interest in things like that?”

“No lower age limit on curiosity,” Crowley says. “Maybe he was looking for reassurance? Maybe he just needs to know that when he grows up, being in a relationship doesn’t mean animosity and silence you could throw a brick through. What if I bring him into the garden tomorrow and you can… explain how relationships have a lot in common with how to take care of a plant?”

“They do?”

“ ‘Course,” Crowley says. “You’ve got to nurture each other and look for signs of distress and address the causes, and if you don’t, that’s when they wither.”

Aziraphale’s face says he’s just said something baffling.

“How do you think it works, then?” Crowley says.

“I don’t know. Maybe I just hadn’t thought of it like that. Or at all, really.” Aziraphale focuses on his hands. “How is it you know more about how love works than I do?”

Crowley adjusts his glasses. “Outsider perspective,” he says. “Anyway, it’s agreed?”

Aziraphale concurs with a murmur, then brushes imaginary dust off his knees. “What did you say about the—er—the boyfriend thing?”

“What do you think?”

As soon as Crowley looks at him, Aziraphale stares at the bookcase as if mentally cataloguing every single title, rearranging them into perfect disorderly order like he would in the bookshop. His gaze halts on the lilac roses Crowley has arranged on one of the shelves. He takes a sharp breath. “I’m certain I’ve no idea,” he says.

Crowley goes back to looking at Aziraphale’s reflection. Two raindrops collide with each other on the pane and their new combined density makes them both fall to the ledge.

* * *

They meet the next morning in the garden, exchanging conspiratorial nods over Warlock’s head underneath a honeysuckle arch.

“Brother Francis is going to tell you some important things about plant life,” Crowley says. “You be good, now.”

Crowley gives Warlock a reassuring pat on the shoulder, because much as Warlock likes being in the garden, he flips from being in awe of Brother Francis to slightly scared of him. Crowley thinks it might be the teeth.

“Master Warlock,” Aziraphale says, “this way.” He waves towards the vegetable patch and Crowley ambles over to the trees, from where he’ll be able to keep a discreet eye on them.

A handful of blue and white flowers have sprung up, entwined with the ivy growing in the shade, and Crowley kneels down to look at them. Flowers always seemed a little over-engineered to him. He knows that insects need them, that they’re part of the food chain—vital for pollination—but the show of them? Well, he felt the design a little excessive, the range of colours an indulgence, the variety of scents to be distracting. But these ones… well, he can’t deny that the richness of the blue is striking amongst the greenery and the white ones have a subtle charm of their own.

Warlock and Aziraphale’s conversation wafts towards him on the breeze. “Before we start, let’s have a little recap, shall we? Can you remember what plants need?”

“Water,” Warlock says.

“Yes, and?”

“Food!”

“Good. Give me one more. One more thing plants need.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you do. Think careful, now.”

Smiling, Crowley inspects the violets. “You can do better than this,” he murmurs. He thinks of Aziraphale’s cottage full of books and pots and pans, the way he looked at the flowers on Crowley’s shelf. “Do better,” he says, and this time they listen, buds springing up between the ivy leaves and unfurling as he watches. On impulse, he picks a handful, thinking Aziraphale might put them in the nook near the hearth.

Over at the vegetable patch, Warlock is near the hedgerow, poking the ground beneath the pumpkins with a stick and Aziraphale is still trying to cajole the answer out of him. “S—ss—? What do we know that plants need that begins with s?”

“Soil?”

“Yes! Very good. Very good indeed, Master Warlock.”

Warlock looks up from the earth he’s upturned and says, “Melissa said that at the end of the summer, the soil hibernates and that’s what harvest festival is about. Is that true, Brother Francis?”

Crowley stands up, clutching his small bouquet of violets.

That’s easy, surely.

Of course soil doesn’t hibernate. Only animals like bears hibernate. Aziraphale knows that, doesn’t he?

Aziraphale looks to Heaven for answers. “Well if she said that, then it must be—”

Crowley waves like he’s signalling a ship away from treacherous rocks. He manages to attract Aziraphale’s attention, and shakes his head.

“No,” Aziraphale says, making it sound more like a question than Warlock’s question was.

“What does happen, then?” Warlock says.

His back is still turned, so Crowley mimes digging.

“Well, master Warlock,” Aziraphale says, cocking his head, gaze darting from Crowley’s face to the motion he’s making and back again, “at the end of the season you need to… bury the leftover vegetables, like a sort of funer—?”

Crowley makes a cutting gesture across his own neck.

Aziraphale squints at him, with a look of mild disgust. “That is of course after you’ve beheaded them?”

Crowley balls his fists, rolls his eyes, letting his head loll back in frustration.

“It’s quite a complicated business, so it is,” Aziraphale says.

Sighing, Crowley carefully acts out placing a spade into the ground and putting his foot on it, pushing it into the soil.

Aziraphale’s squint deepens.

Crowley does it again, this time mouthing the words:

_Digging._

_I’m digging it over._

_DIGGING._

“And there’s the—er—the dancing? Sort of like a ritual stamping. Very important, the stamping ritual. Goes back to ancient times, it does.” Aziraphale swallows, heavily. “People of all kinds, they’d come together at harvest time to…stamp on things in a… celebration of the wondrous abundance of nature.”

Crowley gives up and strides over. “Will you look at the time,” he says, placing a hand on Warlock’s head. He steers him away from the vegetable patch and back onto the lawn. “You go on inside, dear, and wash your hands for lunch.”

He waits until Warlock has retreated over the lawn and almost reached the house before turning on Aziraphale.

“Ritual stamping?” Crowley says. “I might as well go home. If you’re going to invent borderline satanic rituals about ceremonial beheadings for vegetables, what is there left for me to do?”

“Well I don’t know,” Aziraphale says, tugging the front of his smock down as if it might behave like a waistcoat. “They do all sorts of weird things in churches. They let children put candles in oranges and walk around with them even though that is clearly incredibly dangerous. They eat those tiny wafers and pretend they’re imbibing the body—the _actual body_—of Jesus. Compared to all of that, a little ceremonial beheading followed by a ritual stamping seemed… perfectly likely.”

Crowley can’t argue with that.

“What were you doing over there, anyway?”

“Well if you must know,” Crowley says, “I was… picking these.” He extends the violets. “Here.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale says. He takes them with a brush of touches which zings all the way up to Crowley’s throat and all the way down to his toes. “How lovely.”

“They’re only going to die. And faster now I’ve picked them, obviously.”

“Well, I think they’re very nice.” Aziraphale selects one of the blue ones. “May I?” His gaze darts to Crowley’s shoulder.

Crowley’s not sure what he means, but he makes an assenting face anyway.

With deft fingers, Aziraphale lifts the lapel of Crowley’s jacket and tucks the stem into the spare buttonhole at the top. He lays it back down, smooths the fabric, and adjusts the position of the flower until he’s happy with the way it’s lying. “There,” he says. “It’s quite fetching on you. I thought it would be.”

His fingers linger, even though they’re done with the task, tracing the stitching on Crowley’s lapel.

Crowley wonders if they can feel him not breathing. “Er—”

He’s got nothing.

His brain is utterly void.

Empty like the emptiest thing that’s ever been upended and had its contents spilled everywhere.

“Ah.” Aziraphale glances over his shoulder. “We have an audience.”

Crowley follows the path of where he’s looking all the way up to Warlock’s bedroom window, where Warlock’s face is pressed to the glass.

“I’d better—” Crowley nods in the direction of the house.

“Of course. See you later, perhaps?” Aziraphale says, and his fingers finally slip away.

All the way back across the vast lawn, and through the formal hedges, and the French windows that open into the atrociously tasteless kitchen, Crowley can’t think.

His heart is gambolling through his chest, beating in a way it usually doesn’t, like all of a sudden, the organ in the cage of his ribs is there for something. His feet are shaky on the stairs and he pauses at the top to get a grip of himself.

Finding he can’t, he calls out, “Won’t be a minute,” and slips into the bathroom. There’s not a mirror to stare at himself in, the way he’s seen humans do on television, as if it’s possible to find the answers to all life’s big questions in the lines of their own face, so he stares at the shower curtain instead.

What was that?

What the h… what the _what_ was that?

The shower curtain doesn’t have the answer, but it does have a tiny speck of what will turn into mould given enough time. Crowley scrubs it off with his fingernail.

Once he’s relatively certain he can make a neutral expression, he opens the door. Right into the path of the Dowling’s chef. “Mind out,” she says.

“Er—”

“You alright?”

Crowley has no idea.

“That lunch?” he says.

She hands Crowley a plate of egg and soldiers and a big glass of juice. “Bit sparse. I got a pig of a hangover. Got some biscuits and cake as’ll be ready in an hour or so though. Pop down if you fancy it.”

Crowley takes his lunch into Warlock and sets it on the table. He’s expecting a question about what he was doing with the gardener, but Warlock is busy colouring an entire page of his sketchbook black.

“Very emotive,” Crowley says. “Eat your egg before it gets cold.” 

The afternoon passes quickly. One of the great surprises of this whole endeavour is how easy Crowley finds it to lose himself in inventing games that are educational by stealth and balancing colouring with toy soldiers and dressing up dolls. He revels in the excuse of thinking no further than the next set of challenges in their ever-evolving game of dinosaur skittles, and by bath time, he feels more at equilibrium than he might’ve imagined possible when he locked himself in the bathroom earlier.

Warlock splashes a protest against the tiles at having to shampoo his hair, but Crowley has watched Mrs Dowling try and threaten Warlock into doing it, with little success and much consternation for all concerned.

“Do it for me,” Crowley says, “and then I won’t have to scold or nag you and we can both have a story instead of arguing with each other.”

Warlock sighs, but stops splashing and dollops shampoo on the top of his head.

Crowley scrubs his fingers through it. He has had rather a lot more practice at being persuasive than Mrs Dowling has, he supposes. “Thank you,” he says, and hands Warlock a cup to wash the suds away with. “Are you ready to get out?”

“Do I have to?”

Crowley sighs. Of course as soon as Warlock is in the bath, he doesn’t want to get out. “Two more minutes, then,” Crowley says. He tugs the leg of the pyjamas down the radiator so the ankles will be toasty and takes a seat on the closed lid of the toilet, eye level with a painting of a pheasant which stares out from the wall as if auditioning to be on the front of a whisky bottle.

“You’re still wearing the flower Brother Francis gave you.”

Crowley looks down into its round, blue-purple face. “So I am. Do you know what it’s called?”

Warlock shakes his sopping head.

“This is a violet. They like the woodland, where it’s dark and quiet. Maybe you could ask Brother Francis to show you them tomorrow.”

Warlock mulls it over. “Is the gardener your best friend, Nanny?”

It should be a poleaxing question, but as he sits there, Crowley realises it’s not.

Or not in the same way the other one was.

“Yes,” Crowley says, but he finds that the idea of being friends, good friends, best friends, even, doesn’t really feel right anymore. “And no,” he adds. “Come on out now, before your pyjamas catch fire.”

* * *

When Crowley gets back to his room, there’s a scrap of paper on his pillow. It says:

_8pm, where the spiders fall freely and the vines wind in comfrey’s embrace_

Crowley squints at it. It’s definitely Aziraphale’s handwriting—he’d recognise that anywhere—but what he can’t work out is why Aziraphale wouldn’t just write the word _greenhouse_. Or just come and get him.

He checks the time. He has half an hour, flicks the radio on for some company, but it’s that panel show and it’s worse than he thought. He freshens up, deciding to keep the jacket but swap his skirt for jeans because it’s starting to get nippy in the evenings. He unbuttons his blouse a little, shakes out his hair from where it’s been pinned against his scalp all day, and heads out, making a quick stop at the kitchen for a piece of cake, which he wraps in some kitchen towel and stows in his pocket.

The gardens after dusk have a serenity to them, the trees secluding them from the noise of the road and the local pubs, even though neither is very far. There are birds in the hedgerow singing the last of the day away and a waft of honeysuckle just on the edge of the air from the archways, and as Crowley strolls past them all, there’s a tingle in the pit of his stomach that isn’t connected to any of it at all.

As promised, Aziraphale is in the greenhouse, but he’s not dressed up in his gardening garb. He’s been taking more chances lately, modifying his teeth to be less obtrusive and more like his own. When challenged, he said if anyone asked, he’d say Brother Francis had decided to invest his wages in the wonders of modern dentistry and the frequent visits from ‘his nephew’ are because of a family emergency of a delicate nature. He’s currently inspecting the tomatoes, which have an infestation of greenfly Aziraphale won’t deal with because he can’t work out what the ethics of exterminating them are.

“What’s this?” Crowley says, leaning on the doorframe of the greenhouse.

Aziraphale spins to face him, inspecting Crowley’s appearance from head to toe and back again. “Oh, you’re here.”

Crowley flashes the paper, caught between two of his fingers. “You’re sending me cryptic notes now? Not that this really qualifies as cryptic. How many things are there in the grounds that have vines?”

“I thought after Warlock saw us, it might be wise to take precautions.”

“Precautions?”

“Yes.”

“Against a child knowing we know each other?”

“There could be spies, Crowley.”

Crowley looks pointedly out at the hedge. “You get that?” he says. “It’s Crowley. With a C.” He looks back, just catches Aziraphale lifting his gaze from where it had settled on Crowley’s chest. “What you doing out here, anyway?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“You dragged me all the way to the greenhouse for no reason?”

“Not no reason. I thought we might _hang out_, as I believe the expression is.”

“Oh,” Crowley says. He’d imagined there was some kind of emergency, something to discuss in regard to their plan, some minor disaster to be averted or cleaned up. “All right, then.” He pushes off the creaking frame, stepping over a vine that’s started to sneak out the door where one of the plants has got a little overexcited. “Fancy a walk?”

They head around the far edge of the grounds, out of sight of the house, where the copse of fir trees drop their pine cones in abundance on a tiny path that eventually leads to the Red Lion. Normally when they’re not heading there, they meet in the kitchen after Warlock has gone to bed and Mrs Dowling has retired to the den to flick through TV channels and chat to her sister about how much she hates England. Or they sit in the library, with Aziraphale giving a running commentary on the glaring omissions from the collection he’s discovered while Crowley sets off various alarms to torment security.

Now he thinks about it, they hang out plenty. What’s Aziraphale talking about? Why is hanging out suddenly a big deal?

“I shall miss it here,” Aziraphale says, “when we have to go back to London permanently.”

“I thought you were misty eyed over your bookshop?”

“A person can hold two contrary viewpoints, Crowley.”

“If you say so.”

They amble down as far as the low, lichen and moss-flecked wall which marks the perimeter of the property. Crowley clambers up the stones, sending bits of gravel flying, and stands on the top, looking out beyond into the forest. He beckons for Aziraphale to join him.

“Do you think we ought to?”

“Been down here loads of times,” Crowley says, even though he hasn’t. “No one cares. Come on.”

He steps off, lands on the crunchy leaves on the other side of the wall, holds out his hand.

Aziraphale shoots several glances at the surrounding trees as if expecting a celestial SWAT team before he takes it and lets Crowley steady him as he gingerly climbs over the wall.

The reward for their efforts is a small clearing a few hundred metres deeper into the wood, the kind someone of a whimsical disposition might write fairy stories about. Around the edges, age-old trees stand watch, one fallen to create an inviting seat, with fungi sprouting out of a mossy crevice in a gash down the trunk. Dark has crept in, but above them shines a brilliant full moon in a cloudless sky. More violets poke their heads up, just visible where a bank of ivy rises up beyond the trees, and a little way away, a brace of rabbits are grazing and hopping about.

Crowley folds himself down against the tree trunk, one arm draped over it like it’s the back of a sofa. He indicates the grass next to him, but Aziraphale tuts and miracles a tartan blanket before joining him. “We should’ve brought a snack. I’m famished.”

Crowley produces the package from his pocket. “Could I tempt you to some carrot cake?”

Aziraphale’s face lights up as he takes it, even though the cake is a little squashed, the cream cheese frosting on the top leaking through the paper. “Thank you,” he says, and sets it down on the blanket to unwrap. “How thoughtful.”

“Chef’s very talented. Not sure anyone else appreciates it.” Crowley leans back against the tree trunk and looks at the sky. He finds Jupiter and Venus, picks out a couple of constellations and what he thinks is probably a satellite, crawling through the sky. “You think there are bats here?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m afraid.”

“Been ages since I saw a bat. One of the weirder creations, if you ask me. Like a mouse on a hang glider. Got all that echolocation stuff in their heads but they fly into each other anyway.”

“Do they?”

“Used to see it all the time when I was doing that job on the M25. Hear them launch themselves out of the trees, look up, and then _clonk_. Mid-air collision. You’d think they’d sort it out. Do a rota.” Crowley adjusts on the tree trunk, tucking his head onto his hand. “Or maybe it’s not an accident. Maybe they like it. Maybe it’s social. Maybe it’s _romantic_.”

“I can’t say I’ve given it much thought,” Aziraphale says. He breaks off the corner of the carrot cake and offers the rest across. “But, as ever, you appear to have given it enough thought for the both of us.” 

Crowley demurs on the cake with a sniff. “Need something other than colouring books to keep my brain ticking over.”

Aziraphale eats the snicket of cake the way he always does, as if every tiny piece deserves no less than his full attention. “Yes, one does rather need something other than the end of the world to keep one occupied.”

“Hmm. Decided what to do about your greenfly yet?”

“You know I asked them to leave very nicely but as far as I can tell, it had little to no effect.”

“You _asked them nicely_?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I explained it was nothing personal, I just need them not to harm the tomatoes. Quite rude, really, just ignoring me like that.”

“You want me to have a word with them?” Crowley says. He’s joking but Aziraphale’s face lights up.

“Oh, would you?”

“Pestilence is not really my area but I’m sure I can improvise.”

“I’d really be very grateful.”

Crowley studies him. Aziraphale’s smile is slightly hopeful and a little coy, makes him think of all the things they’ve done lately, the nights at the pub and the gigs and the quiet evenings in Aziraphale’s cottage with a Judy Garland record and a glass of wine. He thinks of Aziraphale asking him to _hang out_, of flowers given and received, of invisible lines between words and how they might not really be there at all.

“Perhaps I could take you out somewhere,” Aziraphale says. “I owe you for the concert too, don’t I?”

“Or,” Crowley says, with care, “we could… go on a picnic.”

To most people, a picnic is a delightfully quaint social affair, with blankets and wicker hampers and finger sandwiches. But Crowley has been carrying the weight of a loaded picnic for almost fifty years. A picnic is a live grenade, and having tossed it into the conversation, he braces for Aziraphale to catch it, panic, and throw it back so it explodes in Crowley’s face.

He looks down at the cake, a piece of which Aziraphale has broken off and is still holding, and the tartan blanket. “Although… if you think about it,” Crowley says, “we’re sort of on a picnic right now.”

Aziraphale doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t argue, either. He sits very still, the way someone might if they had watched someone toss a live grenade onto the blanket they were sitting on but were trying not to mention it in case that happens to be the thing which sets it off.

And Satan, Crowley just needs Aziraphale to give him _something_.

Half a clue.

A quarter of one, even, to show they’re on the same page.

Slowly, Crowley inches just a little closer, lowers his voice, trying to keep it casual when it feels nothing of the sort. “I’m just saying if you wanted this to be a picnic, it could be.” He’s so close, his chin almost brushes Aziraphale’s shoulder and with the slightest adjustment, his arm could be around him. He thinks he’d like that, someone tucked up against him. Not someone. Aziraphale. “That’s all.”

The next few moments are so quiet, Crowley longs for a collision of bats. He considers using some of his demonic energy to tug a couple of pipistrelles off course, but instead, he says, “Be funny, if we were on a picnic by accident.”

He tilts his head to try and draw Aziraphale into the joke.

Aziraphale doesn’t reply.

And he certainly doesn’t laugh.

Something spikey and hot flutters in Crowley’s veins. “But it’s not an accident, is it. You invited me. To _hang out_.”

The glance Aziraphale shoots him is so quick and sharp, Crowley only just catches it. 

“Why did you want to hang out with me?” Crowley says.

“Why wouldn’t I want to hang out with you? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Friends who picnic?”

Aziraphale fixes his gaze on the blanket between them, perhaps noting there’s a lot less of it than there was when he sat down. “Apparently. We do have all the elements.”

“_All _of them?”

Crowley surveys the side of Aziraphale’s face for something to put with the flowers and the invitation left on his pillow, and he’s not sure if it’s not there or if he just isn’t looking for the right thing.

Aziraphale wets his lip. “We’re here, aren’t we?” he says, looks up at Crowley with trepidation, but something else, too. Something that looks a little bit like the way Crowley has been feeling all day, the thing that made him lose his footing on the stairs and stare at a shower curtain. “And the world may be ending. Quite soon.”

“So you’re saying… maybe people should take their chance to picnic while they can?”

Aziraphale’s mouth twitches with something which might become a smile. “Maybe they should.”

Crowley shifts closer still. He wants to know what that smile would feel like against his own, but the thing that brushes Crowley’s lip is a word, not another mouth.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says. “You can’t—we can’t just… do that.”

“You don’t want to?”

Aziraphale glances at the sky. “It’s not that.”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s just—”

They’ve both started speaking in less than a whisper, like they’re exchanging secrets in the dark. Which, actually, they very much are, and not the kind passed between secret agents or even sleepover guests, the kind which have dwelled so deep inside, their thoughts barely reach that far down. “What? Tell me. Please tell me.”

When Aziraphale finally looks at him, there’s a specific kind of anguish on his features.

Crowley tries to trace it back, to find something in the past to compare it to, but all he can think is _entreating_. It’s entreating.

“How do I know?”

“How do you know what?”

“How do I know that this is—that you’re not just trying to _tempt_ me?”

Crowley frowns, leans back, so surprised by the question he misjudges the distance to the trunk and bumps into it. “Tempt you? Tempt you to what?”

“To—you know.” Aziraphale mimes two circles with his hands, sighs, even more primly than usual when Crowley doesn’t immediately get it. He glances at his knees, but his eyes won’t settle there. “An angel would make a fine conquest, I daresay. From a demonic perspective.”

Conquest?

Demonic perspective?

Crowley peers at him for a long moment to see if he’s joking, eventually coming to the conclusion that he’s not. “When have I ever tried to tempt you?”

“You do it all the time. You literally just offered me carrot cake with the words _can I tempt you to some carrot cake_.”

“That’s not the same.”

The terse set of Aziraphale’s chin suggests he thinks it absolutely is.

“Oh for—” Crowley throws up his hands, but it’s not enough.

He can’t sit still with this, leaps to his feet, spins away from Aziraphale. What even is the word for this? For Heaven’s sake? For fuck’s sake? For pity’s?

“—gaaaaaaah—sake. That’s just a thing I say.”

Crowley breathes heavily at the trees for a moment, thoughts spinning, before he turns back to face Aziraphale.

This can’t be happening.

But it is.

He points at the remains of the cake. “That’s not _actual_ temptation. Carrot cake is not actually the work of the Devil, despite having raisons in it.”

“All the same.”

“It’s not, it’s not_ all the same_ at all. It’s not even in the same ballpark as _vaguely similar_.”

Aziraphale’s face doesn’t budge and his gaze fixes on a tree over Crowley’s shoulder. “I know how tempting works. I did it for you enough times.”

“You did _your _version. You have no idea what I do—what I’m like when I’m actually trying to make someone… stray from the path of riotousness or whatever you would call it.” Crowley’s aware that he’s gesturing wildly in some kind of effort to expel the things he’s feeling from his body via his hands, but he can’t stop. “You know why? Because I don’t do it in front of you, let alone _to _you. And I can categorically state that me trying to tempt someone looks absolutely nothing like this.”

“Which is exactly what you’d say if you _were_ trying to tempt me.”

Crowley’s nostrils flare. “Fine. Maybe I am. Maybe I don’t know I’m doing it. Maybe it’s innate. Maybe I’m laying a trap that I’m somehow not privy to. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s part of the plan.” He paces across the grass, stares up beyond the trees. “Is this you? Is this your work? Because if it is, well, fucking fuck you.”

“Don’t swear at the Almighty, Crowley.”

“Why not?” Crowley waves both his arms. “Why the Heaven not?”

Aziraphale tugs on his collar. “It makes me nervous. You might be comfortable in the Almighty’s bad books, but I am not.”

Crowley swallows.

This is what it’s about, isn’t it? Being with him would be a black mark as far as Aziraphale’s concerned. Blot on his Holy copy book. And truth be told, Crowley’s not half as comfortable with God’s displeasure as you’d think he’d be after thousands upon thousands of years of it.

His thoughts calm, and one lifts its head above all the others. He crouches down so they’re on a level, face to face, and leans in. “Aziraphale,” he says, lowering his voice. “When have I ever deceived you? When have I ever done anything underhand when it came to you?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily know, would I? That would be the point. You don’t announce you’re being deceitful to the person you’re deceiving. You lure someone in. I’d be unwitting.” He blinks several times. “That’s why I asked.”

It hits Crowley like a ton of bricks, like God herself has just dropped them from above. “You don’t trust me.”

“You’re a demon.” Aziraphale looks away from whatever face it is that Crowley’s making. “It’s not a judgement. You _are_ a demon.”

“Well it’s good to know where I stand.”

Crowley pushes off the ground with enough force that in other circumstance, he’d launch himself several feet into the air. As it is, he turns sharply away and stalks across the clearing.

“Crowley, don’t be—”

A click of his fingers and whatever Aziraphale was about to say is lost to silence.

* * *

Crowley doesn’t sleep, that night. He paces his room until he’s bored of the sound of the floorboards creaking, and heads downstairs to the kitchen. The carrot cake is still on the counter, little icing carrots mocking him from the top of it. The piece he took for Aziraphale has left a hole.

He stares at it and stares at it and stares at it, and then opens his mouth as wide as he can in this form and—mostly silently—screams at the ceiling.

Or maybe at God. The two have become largely interchangeable in his mind.

_Are you doing this on purpose? _

_I bet you are._

_How dare you, how fucking dare you._

_Is this it?_

_Is this my real punishment?_

_Was all the falling stuff just some bullshit excuse to put me down here and strand me in this fucking chaos of feeling??_

_Is it?? IS IT???? _

_AAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH—_

There’s a rap on the side window. 

“Fuck,” Crowley hisses, and hides behind the curtains which bracket the French windows.

A second after he’s ensconced behind the expensive drapery, he realises that though the velvet is heavy enough to conceal him from anyone in the room, the person he’s hiding from isn’t in the room.

They’re outside.

And if the footsteps on the patio are anything to go by, they will shortly be on the other side of the French Windows, which, being glass as windows generally tend to be, are see-through. How did he forget that? He blames the pressure of the moment, but he’s still standing there when they tap again, right at his shoulder blades this time.

“Nanny? Is that you?” It’s the chef. “Everything alright in there?”

Crowley fumes up at the God-ceiling.

_This is you, I know it is._

_A curse, a pigging CURSE on everyone and everything which has brought me to this place. _

Crowley bites down the urge to kick the curtains, making a half-hearted plan. Made a snack. Indigestion. Got really into _Midsomer Murders_, you know how it is, sorry for the bother. He opens the French windows.

“Thought it was you. You didn’t half give me a fright.”

The chef strolls in, reaching behind the kitchen door for her apron, slipping it over her spikey hairdo. “What you doing up so early?”

“Early?”

“You’ve not been up all night?” 

Crowley is usually good under pressure, but maybe there’s been rather too much of it in the last few hours because he can’t think of anything, even though he knows he had a lie formed and ready to go a second ago.

The chef skirts him to hoik the pantry door open and fishes inside for a massive container of flour. It lands on the island in the centre of the kitchen with a thump and the chef cracks the lid open and tosses a handful onto the surface. 

Crowley edges to the breakfast bar and sinks into a seat. Over the sound of the chef thwacking the dough onto the counter and kneading it vigorously, he watches dawn’s stealthy creep up the shrubbery and over the hedgerow. It’s accompanied by the first chirping of the birds and inevitably, his gaze is drawn to the little cottage. His roses are wilting around the door.

He wonders if Aziraphale is in there, not sleeping.

If he’s reading.

If he’s thinking about Crowley at all.

“Thought perhaps a cup of tea might be in order,” the chef says. Crowley’s about to tell her to sling it, what good is tea when he feels like this, but she leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “Snuck a brandy in it for ya.”

She holds it out. On the plate sit two shortcake biscuits: the finger ones with twinkling sugar on the top, a sprinkling of starlight on crumbs.

“Thanks,” he says. “Sorry about the—er—” He makes a gesture which he hopes encompasses encountering a co-worker ranting at the ceiling at ungodly o’clock when all you were expecting to have to deal with is dough. “Bad day.”

“Better out than in,” she says, and pats him on the arm with a floury hand. “Anything I can, you know, assist with at all?” 

“Probably not.”

She turns away.

“Why won’t… _people_ just take me as I am?” Crowley says. “Why do they keep acting as if I’m behaving one way when I’m actually behaving another?”

The chef pulls up a stool.

“Is it that hard to pay attention? Is it that hard to judge me on my actions and my… character, even, rather than having this… expectation of who I am and just _deciding_ that must be immutably right?”

The chef nods, sighs. “I hear ya.”

“Thank you.”

“Some people are just arseholes, I guess.”

Crowley nudges the edge of the shortbread with his fingertip. “What if they’re not, though,” he says. “What if they’re not an arsehole at all? What if they’re… a good person but just a bit… judgmental? About you in particular?”

“My aunt’s like that,” the chef says. “Everyone thinks she’s such a character. Life and soul of the party. Go out of her way to do stuff for ya. You’re in hospital, she’ll have a cottage pie and a lasagne in your freezer before the doc’s even signed your discharge papers.” She sighs. “Also fantastically homophobic. Won’t stop with the ‘jokes’ about my hair, you know the sort of thing.”

Crowley grimaces sympathetically.

“It sucks, doesn’t it? Because if they were an arsehole through and through, you’d just cut them out your life, wouldn’t ya? But you always think if you just try hard enough, show ‘em who you really are, that one day, they’ll come round. And then when they don’t, it’s like a double punch in the face. One from them and one from yourself for giving them yet another chance to hurt you.”

“She have a name, this aunt of yours?” Crowley says. “I could curse her. Nothing major. Ladder every single pair of tights she buys as soon as she puts them on, something like that.”

The chef chuckles. “Ask me,” she says, “you just got to remember it’s never about you. It’s about them. Their fear.”

“You reckon?”

“Absolutely. And if they try and tell you who you are, that you’re some twisted version of yourself that’s based in nothing but their prejudice and not the reality of how you live your life, then they can bugger off, frankly.” She offers Crowley a sympathetic smile. “Anyway. I better get back to it. Breakfast rolls aren’t going to make themselves.”

She slides off the stool, landing with a puff of flour, and disappears into the pantry again, rooting around and muttering about where she put the bloody poppy seeds.

Crowley downs the tea and sits with the biscuits for a while.

And then, for want of better things to do, he thinks _I am come, devourer of your universe_ and eats them all.

At once.

While they’re still on the plate.

He feels a flicker of something like grim, resigned pleasure at the thought of shortcake fingers free-falling through his digestive system to an ignominious end in a pit of his stomach acid.

It doesn’t make him feel better, as such.

But it’s the best he’s got for now.

* * *

Mrs Dowling is not a morning person. From what Crowley can tell, she’s not really an afternoon person, either, and even finds the evenings something of a trial. So it’s a surprise when, the next morning, she sticks her head into Warlock’s room at barely ten past nine. “Could I have a word, Nanny?”

“Of course.”

Crowley joins her in the hallway, where she’s stationed herself between the bathroom and the linen closet, beneath a painting of the fourth or fifth American president, Crowley forgets. Whoever he is, he’s staring down at them both with imperious superiority, and for that alone, Crowley dislikes him.

Mrs Dowling holds her arm across her stomach, her other hand out as if it’s used to holding a cigarette, even though she hasn’t smoked in recent memory, going by the smell of her clothes.

“As you’re aware, no doubt, the new school year is starting,” she says. “Tad and I—mostly Tad—we feel that Warlock should focus more on his education. So we’re hiring a tutor. And that means we won’t require your services any longer. Sadly.”

Crowley stares at her.

He should’ve known this was coming. Boys don’t need nannies forever, even though this one could actually live forever and—if you take the scope of his eternal lifetime into account—is barely out of infancy. If he’d thought about it, he’d probably be a bit better prepared for the feeling, for the spiralling of panic about leaving here, about trusting that Warlock has been enough changed by their intervention for it to count. He considers making her change her mind. Hell, he could change his appearance and come back as the tutor and nobody would be any the wiser.

But he knows already that he won’t.

“I see,” he says.

“Tad and I will make sure you have fantastic references.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Puzzlement crosses Mrs Dowling’s face but she doesn’t press it. “He’s very fond of you, so I think it might be better if you break it to him yourself?”

“Of course. I’ll do it now.”

Mrs Dowling smiles and clops off down the hall on her heels.

It takes all of Crowley’s willpower not to add a series of grates to the floor.

* * *

The conversation goes ok, he thinks.

Or not ok.

Borderline rubbish.

Warlock asks why, why must Crowley leave, why now, why does he need some dumb tutor when Nanny knows everything?

For the first time, Crowley really understands how irritating it is to be faced with someone who does nothing but asks questions, especially ones which there’s no answer for.

So he doesn’t answer them.

“I will miss you too,” Crowley says, and the crack of his own voice tells him how much he means it.

* * *

He spends his last day at the Ambassador’s pretending he’s packing. And also pretending he’s not waiting for Aziraphale to knock on the door and say that he’s heard and what are they going to do?

When it becomes apparent that’s not going to happen, Crowley indulges a whim and whisks his things into the carpet bag using a small gust of magic it’ll be easy to write off as a spot of minor troublemaking.

It was always his last favourite part of the film, when Mary Poppins just… leaves. But the time comes, as time always does, when there’s a thing you wish it would stop to avoid, and Crowley finds himself in his hat, with his coat buttoned up, and the chef and the Dowlings—or two of them, at least—lined up at the front door.

The chef gives him a grim smile and then punches Crowley’s arm. “You look after yourself.”

“Say goodbye, Warlock,” Mrs Dowling says, pushing him forward.

Crowley kneels down and holds out his hand to Warlock. He’s not sure Warlock will take it; he’s been sulking all day. “Don’t forget what I’ve taught you, now.”

Warlock flings his arms around Crowley’s neck.

Crowley’s never really hugged a child before. In fact he’s not sure he’s hugged a human before. Or anything, really, unless that time he clung to a horse’s neck for dear life while it ignored his commands to stop cantering counts. He thinks he gets the mechanics mostly right and squeezes just enough to be polite, and then a little more.

The Bentley is parked outside, even though Nanny left it around the back in the garage. Crowley deposits his things in the boot, sparing a fraction of a glance towards the gardener’s cottage.

He thinks the curtains twitch.

Maybe.

Or probably not.

He gets in, slams the door, and floors the accelerator, leaving a flurry of gravel in his wake, and Aziraphale to find his own way home.


	4. Thorn In My Side

They walk through Primrose Hill to where the Bentley is patiently waiting outside the house with the yellow door. Crowley slips into the driver’s side and leans across the seat to open the passenger one for Aziraphale. “Bookshop?”

“I was thinking—not?” Aziraphale lands on the seat, keeps his face forward, as if that might prevent Crowley from seeing his expression. “Wouldn’t want to impose, of course, but—I rather wondered if I might come back to yours.”

Crowley blinks. He sits there with it for a moment, staring at the windscreen so hard he could close his eyes and draw a perfect map of all the imperfections in the glass relative to the position of the tiny flies who recently met their end on it. He’s aware that the longer he sits there, using all his galaxy-making brain power on calculating the relative position of chips and flies to each other, the more loaded he makes it, so he starts the car.

They chatter about the food and the other diners at the Ritz, both talking a little too fast and saying things they’ve definitely already said, accompanied by the burbling of a Rachmaninov CD. Crowley’s probably on borrowed time with it and any second it’s going to morph into I Want To Break Free.

And maybe it should. He’d forgotten how romantic Rachmaninov can sound, when you’re in a car with someone who’s just announced they’d like to come back to yours.

Not that he’s ever been in this position before.

He grips the steering wheel and floors the accelerator, even though that means invariably they’ll get there faster, but now he’s done it, he can’t ease off, otherwise Aziraphale will notice. Hell-to-Betsy. He’s been thinking about this, some version of it, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. And hours ago, mere hours ago, Aziraphale asked Crowley to kiss him. How is it possible that this has _still_ taken him by surprise?

The streets grow more and more familiar and Crowley curses Primrose Hill for not being further away. He debates trying to cause some kind of spontaneous traffic jam or getting them lost on purpose—it’s not as if Aziraphale has any concept of how to navigate anywhere by car—but it presses on him far more than it used to that they could well be on borrowed time, and not the sort involving Freddie Mercury bursting out of a speaker unexpectedly to declare he’s fallen in love for the first time and this time he knows it’s for real. 

Crowley pulls into the carpark, into a spot that stays miraculously free at all times. He can’t remember if he did something to it which makes motorists not see it or if the cars themselves just sense it’s not worth their while to try and park there, brain spiralling through anything it can grasp at to avoid thinking about what’s actually happening.

Or not what’s happening, because what’s happening is parking.

But what happens next.

What’s about to happen, whether he’s ready for it or not.

They idle to a stop. As soon as there’s no engine noise and no Rachmaninov, the silence manifests, much like Crowley imagines an ex-lover haunting a wedding might: invisible but everywhere; unmentioned by undeniably present. He thinks of Soho, the flask in his lap and the tangle of emotions he just had to sit with, the Ambassador’s garden, the trees folding in on him as he walked away with his heart shaken and his hands shaking.

Crowley reaches for the door handle.

A soft touch on his elbow stops him. “Before you—before we—”

Crowley turns his head.

“Er—”

Aziraphale is always a mix of readable and not, wears expressions that Crowley thinks he’s fathomed the meaning of, only for him to pull the rug out a second later with a flicker of his eyebrow or a quirk of his mouth which flips the entire thing on its head. It’s no less so in the acerbic glow from the lampposts. Crowley catalogues the different things playing out on his features: trepidation; the unease of someone who’s not quite made a decision; and interest, definitely interest. Or so Crowley thinks, but he’s thought that before and been wrong.

It helps to catalogue Aziraphale’s emotions, so he doesn’t have to think about his own. He wouldn’t know where to start with his own.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Aziraphale says, with faltering soft politeness, “for an enchanting afternoon. And a truly lovely evening.”

“It was my pleasure.”

Crowley lets it hang for a moment to see if Aziraphale reaches for the door.

He doesn’t.

The way people don’t when they’re waiting for something.

Something people do after they’ve saved the world and escaped doom and had a truly lovely evening, perhaps.

Something goodnight-ish.

Something they’ve wanted to do for a long time.

The corner of Aziraphale’s mouth lifts into the start of a smile, but he also darts a look at the sky, as if God Herself might be watching them through opera glasses, one hand in a bag of lightning bolts as if they’re Malteasers. Not that you can smite the likes of them with a lightning bolt. Scorch admonishingly perhaps, but a smiting of two supernatural entities is going to require a little more firepower.

What _would_ happen if either of them got struck by lightning? Would their bodies explode like a tree full of sap? Does it count as discorporated if you’re just splintered down the middle?

It doesn’t seem like quite the moment to bring it up. Crowley’s glad for once he’s recognised that before letting the question out of his mouth rather than two seconds afterwards, like he usually does.

“No one’s watching, angel,” he says, gently.

Aziraphale’s mouth twists in soft anguish.

Crowley wants to throw himself out of the car, to scamper from the country and let Aziraphale go back to cataloguing books and waiting for Heaven to tell him it’s all been a terrible mistake, that he was right and they’re sorry and won’t he please come back?

But he doesn’t.

He’s starting to understand it, a little. The back and forth of it. The way it seems like Crowley is always going too fast and yet they’re stalled where they have been for ages. Aziraphale has trouble with the distance between wanting things and taking them. Earlier, he ordered the Champagne macaron, even though he said he wanted the chocolate truffle.

‘If I ordered that one now, I’d have nothing to look forward to next time, would I?’

‘But you can’t leave everything for next time,’ Crowley said. ‘Because sometimes, next time never comes.’

He’s still not sure which one of them he was actually talking to. His own inaction gnaws at him as much as Aziraphale’s does, if not more so.

“Do you want me to—I could—” Crowley waves vaguely at the air. “No one can see us there. Not Gabriel, not Beelzebub, not Satan, even.”

Aziraphale raises an eyebrow. “That’s a… heck of a parlour trick.”

More like the result of three millennia of persuading the laws of physics to bend to his will, but ok. Crowley shrugs.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Aziraphale says, eyes skittish, throat working overtime, “how does it work, exactly?”

Crowley puffs his cheeks out at the night beyond the windshield. “It’s… you know when you lose a coin down the back of the sofa? And you know it’s there but you can’t see it? But then you look again and it _is_ there, was there all along? It’s sort of like that,” Crowley says. “Doesn’t last long, but—”

He turns his head, lets his gaze fall to Aziraphale’s mouth.

It’d be long enough for a goodnight kiss.

“Important thing is—I can, if you want me to. Not just now. Any time. Any time you like. If you just want a bit of space to ourselves. Or not space. Time. Same thing though, really, isn’t it? Sometimes I think we only invented time so we could talk about how far away things are. _How far is it? About fifteen minutes in decent traffic. Look at that, it’ll take 14 million years to get there_.”

He feels an eternity from where he wants to be, that’s for sure.

And right next to it at the same time, which is the longest distance imaginable, apparently. 

“Or we could just—” He glances towards the entrance of the building. “—go inside?”

Aziraphale’s nod manages to be both disappointed and relieved.

The night air brushes Crowley’s skin as he opens the car door. He bumps Aziraphale’s arm with his elbow as he collects him from the other side of the Bentley and leads the way up the steps to the main door.

Just inside the entrance, there’s a bank of post boxes. One of them has his name—or the human affectation of one at least—attached to it on a tiny plaque. He could check the post for something to do that’ll bring them back to normality, but all he gets are circulars from the Green Party addressed to a Mr A Crossley and occasionally a newsletter from the Neighbourhood Watch, which he reads religiously. Mostly for ideas. Wheelie bins are the basis of a good 80% of them. He’s run the numbers: wheelie bins account for roughly the same percentage of human angst as a handful of mildly irritating common diseases.

Not that he needs to hang onto that scrap of knowledge now, he suspects.

Crowley nods hello to one of his neighbours, who’s taking their dog out, and presses the button to call the lift.

When it arrives, it’s devoid of everything, except light that would rival the anodyne stuff of Heaven. He glances at Aziraphale, checking whether they’re on the same page. Or if not the same page then the same chapter, at least: they’re not going to snog in the lift but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to do it at all because kissing is just sort of… there, now. Aziraphale put it there and Crowley suspects if they don’t do it at some point relatively soon, _not_ doing it is going to eat both of them alive.

That’s the page they’re on.

Or the chapter.

He thinks it is, anyway; sometimes it’s like they’re on the same page of completely different books.

Aziraphale’s making an in-depth study of the lift buttons, but when he senses Crowley looking at him, he raises his eyes and forces a smile that pretends not to be nervous.

Six thousand years they’ve known each other.

It shouldn’t be a big deal. Humans do it with strangers. Launch themselves at each other just because the calendar says it’s about to be a new year or it’s their birthday or they’re in a nightclub and they’re sad. The insides of Crowley’s knees are sweating. It’s a hell of a time to find out they can do that. That anyone does this _recreationally_ is absurd.

The lift pings to announce their arrival and the doors open. They’ve no option but to step out, which brings them, inevitably, to Crowley’s front door.

He clicks to unlock it, hovers in question.

_Here?_

He thinks it’ll feel different—less goodnight-ish—if they go inside. A goodnight kiss is supposed to happen in a car or on a doorstep or maybe at a bus stop. Once you’re over the threshold, all bets are off. You’ve bypassed a way to bookend the evening and now you’re in the realm of something else.

But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe that’s what Aziraphale wants.

Crowley reaches for the door.

Aziraphale’s forehead creases.

Crowley’s head pounds with his own heartbeat and every single thump is a question.

_What do you want? _

_Is it me? _

_Will it ever be me?_

_Have I got this all wrong?_

Aziraphale’s gaze darts to Crowley’s mouth and back up to his eyes. “Crowley?”

And Crowley thinks: _oh don’t you dare. Don’t ask me again, don’t make me decide whether or not to do it again. I don’t think I can do that. _

“Yes?”

Aziraphale pauses the kind of pause ancient foes could wage a war in, before gesturing to the air around them. “Actually, do you think you might—” He waves two vague circles. “—after all?”

Crowley answers with a blink and a click of his fingers which folds them into a gap between the back of the sofa and nothingness. He doesn’t have time to decorate it, but he manages dim lighting and a low hum of music, like a gramophone playing Judy Garland in another room. He flashes his eyebrow at Aziraphale.

“Show off,” Aziraphale says, with a tiny smile.

Crowley slips his sunglasses off and tucks them into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“We don’t have long, you said?”

Crowley cocks his head. “Long enough, I think.”

“Right. Righty-ho, then.”

Aziraphale looks at Crowley, twitch between a jovial smile and something else tugging on the corner of his mouth. A slight shiver traverses his shoulders, his wings, and Crowley longs to touch, to sooth them, to tell them it’s ok, but daren’t.

“Well. As I said before, it has really been a very lovely evening.”

Crowley nods.

_Ask me._

_Ask me to kiss you._

_Ask me ask me ask me ask me ask me. _

Aziraphale takes a tiny step forward, hands lifting, falling back to his sides, trying again. He searches Crowley’s face, but rather than leaning in, he says, “Goodnight, Crowley.”

And it’s fine.

Aziraphale has literally been to Hell, but the courage to close the scant gap between them eludes him. It’s fine.

It’s always been fine.

Crowley wouldn’t know what to do if—

Aziraphale brushes his hand.

Crowley barely doesn’t leap out of his own wings.

And then gently, Aziraphale lifts their hands between them, Crowley’s fingers draped over his own. He squeezes, like he’s just asked Crowley to dance and Crowley has accepted, looks up to meet Crowley’s eyes, before ducking his head to place a kiss on the back of Crowley’s knuckles.

A pop and a soundless poof.

With a slight stagger, they’re back in the corridor, as if they never left.

Down below, Crowley’s neighbour is playing be-bop and Crowley wants to howl with laughter, about that, and maybe everything.

A moment—soft and slightly startled—passes between them, and then Aziraphale clears his throat and lets go. “Nightcap, before we turn in?” he says, as if he’s still trying to find solid ground again.

Crowley scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, why not?”

The ghost of Aziraphale’s lips is still on Crowley’s skin, as if the kiss might stay there forever, and all he can think as he goes inside is _holy fuck_.

* * *

It’s late. Crowley should be tucked up in bed, or at least lying in it staring at the ceiling.

Instead, he’s sitting in his car in the middle of Soho, listening to the radio. Or not listening to it, really. Ignoring it, the swirl of pop hits from the 80s and the chipper northern DJ reading out tales of what various people who are also up too late are doing. Tending babies. Revising for exams. Working late at bakeries and on overnight shifts in factories. Crowley wants to phone in and tell all of them not to bother, that everything will fall apart soon anyway and no amount of well-adjusted toddlers or good grades or met deadlines will mean a damn thing.

Not that he suspects they’d listen. He’s seen it enough times, humans staring into the face of disaster who just… carry on. Like cogs in a machine who don’t know how to stop turning.

He grips the steering wheel.

As if he’s any different.

He delivered the Anti-Christ and yet yesterday, he still went obediently to Hell, filing his expenses and going to meetings that very much could’ve been an email. He should’ve mentioned it then, when Dicknot and Hastur were arguing over who upset the printer this time: why are we still doing all this paperwork if we’re so convinced the world is going to end? World ends, big war, a lot of us will meet our doom. Are the survivors really going to be bothered with picking through receipts and checking if the Hell Hound permit was correctly stamped and filed? 

There’s a bump, shaking the car, and Crowley’s head flashes with images of Aziraphale banging on the bonnet with the fury of the righteous, but it’s two humans who’ve staggered into his passenger window, and are now vigorously kissing, hands inside each other’s coats, breath forming mutual clouds on the cold air.

“Oi,” Crowley shouts.

Two lust-slack faces turn towards him.

He gestures that he’s very much here and would they mind just… not? And maybe he’s scarier than he intended to be, because they grab for each other and scurry off.

Crowley sighs at the night.

What is he doing.

What is any of this for.

His gaze drifts to the bookshop. The light above the desk is on, and the soft glow of it through the window chills him all the way down. In a weird way, it’s like being cast out, like being an outsider again to the thing he helped to build. The shop might be Aziraphale’s, but Crowley is in there, too. He’s in the angel-themed knickknacks he hoarded and gifted, he’s part of the obscure volumes he helped to track down, he’s on the very shelves between the books he specifically put in the wrong place to save Aziraphale the bother of having to avoid selling them.

It’s the closest thing to a home he’s ever had.

He runs his hands around the steering wheel.

He should just get it over and done with. He should just walk up to the door and act like none of this matters to him. So they almost kissed.

So they almost kissed so much they haven’t spoken in years.

So Aziraphale doesn’t trust him. Not with that.

So they’ve still got to save the world, with him knowing it.

So what?

So.

What.

He should just… be a demon about it.

He should just march up to the door and say _look, angel, I don’t have time for any… feelings. We agreed to do this thing together and none of the other things we’ve done together—or not done together—should get in the way of that, agreed?_

He eyes the doorway, drops back against the seat with a long sigh. Maybe after the next track.

A bit of him thought if he sat here long enough, Aziraphale would spot him. He’s being obvious, after all. He could’ve turned up in something that would blend in more—an inconspicuous Renault or one of those Smart cars you can park facing into the kerb—but he didn’t, because he wanted Aziraphale to see him. He thought it would be easier if Aziraphale was the one to come over, the one to have to say something first, so Crowley could gauge his reaction. Act accordingly.

He flickers with annoyance that it hasn’t happened, that Aziraphale can’t sense him sitting out here. He’s driven past the bookshop every night for three weeks for Heaven’s sake, and hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him. The only indication that he’s even in there is that the lights go on and off and move about: sometimes it’s the lamp on the desk and sometimes a light upstairs and sometimes all of them at once.

He’s been past in the daytime, too. Thought maybe he could pop in while Aziraphale was dealing with customers, deliver the line he’s prepared in the small, truncated, finite space between one first edition emergency and the next. But the door has remained closed. Aziraphale hasn’t so much as opened a window for some fresh air or nipped out for a sandwich.

They’ve not talked before, and for far more drawn out spells than this. Sometimes they were called to different ends of the Earth and sometimes they were annoyed with each other and other times, their paths just didn’t cross for decades. It never made Crowley feel the way he has been, every bit of him prickling with unease. He hasn’t been able to settle on anything, like something is just intrinsically out of place.

He supposes the impending end of the world will do that.

The track peters out and the DJ launches into a dedication to someone who’s missing someone they missed their chance with back in the day. Crowley snaps the radio off. He takes a deep breath, gets out, and strides across the road. The bookshop door is cold underneath his knuckles as he raps on the paintwork. He flattens his ear to it, listens to the scrape of a chair and footsteps that belong to neat, polished shoes getting closer.

“It’s me,” he says, but as soon as Aziraphale turns the key in the lock, hot spikes of panic shoot through Crowley’s entire body. “Don’t.”

Aziraphale stops, and there’s a question on the air.

Crowley wants to be honest, to say _I don’t know if I can handle seeing you, actually, now it’s come to it_, but the words stick in his throat, caught on self-preservation. He reaches for the doorknob, fingers the cold metal, thinking if Aziraphale tries to open the door suddenly, he can pull it to keep it closed between them. “I need to check on him. The boy.”

“Oh?”

“I need—” Crowley’s throat tightens. He’s not going to ask for any of the things that he actually needs. “I need you to meet me there, give me your opinion on… him. So I know what I’m dealing with.”

“Of course.”

Aziraphale is quiet for a moment.

Crowley presses the curve of the doorknob to his palm, feeling inexplicable tenderness for it. He’s missed the shop, the late nights talking about Armageddon and Willkie Collins first editions, the rambling debate about Judy Garland’s best song that they’ve been having for half a century, the red wine Aziraphale chooses that always goes perfectly with whatever they’re discussing.

“Where would you like to meet?” Aziraphale says.

“They’re going to the zoo. Tomorrow afternoon.”

“All right.” Another pause. One you could park a medium-size country in. “I will see you then, then.”

“Yeah.”

Crowley’s done what he had to. He’s secured Aziraphale’s cooperation, a second opinion on if Warlock has turned, but it doesn’t feel done.

And he doesn’t feel like leaving, so he just sinks down on the step outside the door. He leans back against the wood, listening for the sounds of Aziraphale moving away, going back to his reading or making a cocoa.

They never come.

* * *

Crowley slinks home around dawn. He walks through his flat and ends up staring at his collection of palm trees, who are alarmed at first and then baffled by his indifferent attention. He knows he’s only got the rest of the morning to make himself feel ready, that he needs to just stow all of the chaos of feeling that’s running amok through his body and get on with things. He strokes the leaves of the nearest palm. It shivers and he can’t tell, at all, if it likes it.

And it bothers him.

“Snap out of it,” he says, as if it’s a thing he can command of himself the same way he would make an azalea bloom. When it doesn’t work, he turns in a circle and roars at the skylight. “Snap. The Hell. Out of it.”

As his words stop echoing off the concrete, he feels a little more settled in his body, can find himself in the raw ache of his throat and the clench of his fists and the pounding of his heart.

He changes.

Shortens his hair.

Selects a pair of sunglasses which hide the sides of his eyes as well as the front.

He doesn’t want to look like the person Aziraphale rejected, even though he knows Aziraphale would spot him in a crowd with his eyes closed because that’s just the way it works.

* * *

The zoo is predictably a cacophony of children screaming a mix of excitement and sugar.

Crowley chooses a spot by the railings, looks into an enclosure that’s supposed to have meerkats in it, but if they’re in there, they’re all below the ground. He stares into the holes they’ve made one by one, wondering if this is a burrow or if there’s some other word that’s specific to meerkats, because he knows humans like to do that, to come up with as many words as possible for things.

In a way, that’s what caused all the trouble. If he hadn’t started wondering _are we friends, are we boyfriends, are we something else entirely,_ if he’d just stuck to thinking of Aziraphale as Aziraphale, maybe he wouldn’t be here at all.

Or maybe he would.

Maybe it was inevitable.

He stops short of thinking it was part of the plan, because he doesn’t want God anywhere near this.

With a tinkle, Aziraphale appears next to his elbow, his hands clasped in front of him and his shoulders perfectly square. “Hello, Crowley.”

For the first time, Crowley sees all their differences, the way he’s slouched over the railings, dressed in black, where Aziraphale is upright and spotlessly pale.

“Thanks for coming,” Crowley says.

“Not at all, we’re in this together, after all.”

Crowley breathes in.

Are they?

Have they ever been?

Lately he feels like he’s spent most of his existence thinking they were going one way, that they were both becoming grey, but after the Ambassador’s garden, he realised Aziraphale didn’t feel like that at all. It was all black and white to him. Demon and angel, like the last six thousand years didn’t matter at all.

“How’ve you been?” Aziraphale says, and he smiles, just a little, and quite sadly.

“Fine. Yeah. You?”

Aziraphale swallows. “Quite well.”

He looks terrible.

Well, not terrible. Crowley doesn’t think it’s possible for an angel to _actually_ look terrible. But instead of the cosy perfectionism his appearance usually exudes, instead of seeming like someone perfectly at home in their human form and all its accoutrements, there’s a purposefulness to the way he’s standing.

He’s wearing his clothes like armour, Crowley realises. 

To defend him against what, is the question.

“Shall we?” Aziraphale gestures to the path. 

Crowley follows, looping around him, checking the trees for faces and the faces of the kids scuttling by for traces of celestial energy.

“Lovely weather today.”

Crowley mutters a non-word of response. It’s always like this when they haven’t seen each other in a while. Always stilted, and this time, the remnants of their last conversations are sharp on the corner of his consciousness. Crowley always has all this… stuff built up, all the little things he would’ve said to Aziraphale if they weren’t not talking, all these little tiny, utterly inconsequential things he wants to tell him wedged under his tongue. Every time, he wants to say look, can we just _not_ not talk? Can we just agree that even when we’re in the middle of whatever it is that I can write my stupid thoughts on a postcard and drop them through your letterbox so I’m rid of them?

And that’s just the small stuff.

The big stuff….

Well. That’s not under his tongue, nice and contained. It’s everywhere.

But they’re not going to talk about that.

They never do.

They walk past an enclosure where a couple of wallabies are hopping indifferently between piles of wallaby kibble, round some kind of red panda zone filled with trees. The animals on the information boards look nothing like panda pandas; Crowley would point that out if things were different. _Look at that. What is that even about? Are we just calling things pandas, now? It’s not even like God fancied doing different colours because they are a completely different size and shape and everything. What happened, did She just run out of words to call things and started tossing pandas out willy-nilly?_

_Maybe everything is pandas. _

_Maybe we all are._

Maybe that’s why nothing makes sense anymore.

Aziraphale clears his throat. “So we need to check on the boy, you said?”

Crowley shoves his hands into his pockets. Aziraphale wants to be all business. At least it feels familiar, doesn’t necessarily feel worse, the way he thought it might when he was clinging to the wrong side of the bookshop doorknob. “Birthday coming up, all that, you know.”

“Right. Have you—er—felt any—because you can, can’t you? You can feel demonic energy shifting.”

Crowley shrugs. “Lots of things are shifting,” he says. “Satan’s edgy. Forces are mobilising. Hard to pick anything out specifically. Be different when—if—he goes full Anti-Christ. Whole world will feel him, then.”

Their feet crunch on the gravel, perfectly in step with each other. Crowley used to think that meant something, that the casual way their bodies follow each other was more than just coincidence playing out across their limbs. He used to think they were in synch, that a balance existed between them, but the last century has poked holes in all his theories, one after another.

“What do you think he’ll do first, if it happens?”

“He likes history. Maybe he’ll bring stuff back, some of the inventive ways humans have found to destroy each other in the past. Pit them against modern warfare, something like that.”

“Well, it could be worse,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley sighs. “It very much could be. That’s the point.”

The path forks. The signpost, which has quirky cartoon monkeys hanging off it, indicates that one way leads to the penguins and the other to the reptile house. He chooses the latter, and the path becomes narrower, more winding, with shrubbery pushing in on either side.

Aziraphale is just at his elbow and in other circumstances Crowley would like it, but as it is, it just makes him feel very aware of his own spine. 

“So,” Aziraphale says. “You want me to see if I can tell how… bad things might be? How much evil he has inside him?”

“Exactly,” Crowley says. “Some of the other demons, they think he’ll crack the Earth open like… one of those chocolates, you know the ones that look like oranges? And they’re supposed to fold out into neat segments but they never do and you have to bang them on the table to get them apart?”

“I—er—how imaginative.”

“Yeah, only the Earth isn’t filled with orange and chocolate. It’s filled with… a massive ball bearing and surrounded by rocks heated until they melt. Point is, they think he’ll start with the actual destruction of the Earth, not just the obliteration of the humans, that when it comes down to it, there won't be much left for any of us to do.”

“You disagree. I can hear it in your voice.”

Crowley stares up at the sky. “I don’t know.”

“But the other demons are just guessing. You _know_ him.”

“For all the good it’ll do.” Crowley watches a pebble skid away from his foot and fall off the edge of the path into the border. “He’s not going to care I was his nanny. I’m not going to get any special favours once it kicks off.”

“No?”

“Most demons, they think they get it, what Satan is really like. But they don’t know. They haven’t got a fucking clue.”

Aziraphale tucks his hands behind his back. “But you do.”

“I know enough to know that Satan is not just a bigger demon. And his child—his _child_—is not going to mess about.” He’s listened to a lot of talk down in Hell about how things will happen. Everyone’s so secretive down there though, it’s hard to pull apart what’s based in policy and feasibility studies and what’s plain old fantasy. “Whatever he’s going to do, it’s going to change everything. Literally everything.”

Over the hedge, a couple of parrots squawk in a way that’s impossible to decode as friendly or romantic or the animosity of mortal enemies. Crowley wonders if it’s always like that, if the distances he always imagined exist between the three aren’t really there at all. 

“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it,” Aziraphale says, “that a child has all that within him.”

“He’s not really a child, though, is he,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale glances over. Crowley waves at himself. “I look like a human but it doesn’t mean I am one.”

“You treated Warlock like one,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley halts right on the edge of the path.

“You did,” Aziraphale says. “There’s no point denying it. I saw you. I saw you play games with him and read to him and teach him things about life and the world and—” Aziraphale steps closer, lowers his voice, and it’s a bit too close and a bit too familiar, makes adrenaline spike through Crowley’s veins. “—love. You were there for him when no one else was and you were kind. I might’ve told him to love things, but you—”

Crowley looks away.

He’s shaky all over.

Normally he’d hiss about not saying that sort of thing, that if Hell finds out—it’s fourteen different kinds of violation at least. He can’t look at Aziraphale, so he glowers at the trees near the brick-built reptile house. He must be losing his touch because they don’t so much as twitch. He breathes at the panic. What if Hell does find out? What are they going to do? Threatening to kill him a couple of weeks before Armageddon lacks its usual sting. And what’s he got to lose anymore, really?

He watches a party of school children go into the reptile house, stares at the brickwork for so long they come out again, brimming with facts and figures about pythons, chattering away their adrenaline.

Hell's not what he’s actually panicking about, he realises.

He didn’t know Aziraphale had seen.

He didn’t know he’d done it in a way that could be observed.

He didn’t know Aziraphale was even looking for those things.

“Someone had to do it,” Crowley says, and when he finally looks back, Aziraphale’s brow uncrinkles for the first time since they got here.

“Could I… buy you an ice cream, perhaps?” Aziraphale says.

Crowley flicks his gaze to Aziraphale’s eyes. He’s testing the waters, seeing how deep this particular hurt went, if they might be able to get back to somewhere like where they were before what happened in the woods.

Even after everything, Crowley’s glad to see him, glad not to be alone, glad he wants _something _more than work_._ He can’t make a word, but he raises an eyebrow.

Aziraphale’s shoulders relax, and he smiles. “There’s a cafe just back there,” he says.

And as they wander over, as Aziraphale tells him about something Gabriel said and debates the various merits of wafers and mint choc chip and praline, as they sit like they have so many times in so many different places for so many different reasons at a table for two, Crowley realises something else, too.

He’ll always be glad to see Aziraphale.

And he’ll always forgive him, however much what he's done hurt.

And God, what kind of cosmic joke is that.


	5. All This And Heaven Too

Crowley bolts awake, heart racing, throat hoarse, screaming without making noise. Someone’s there.

He twists his head and jolts: it’s Aziraphale. It’s Aziraphale saying his name. Crowley assesses: window, locked, unbroken; the front door, still closed; Aziraphale, frantic but unharmed; himself, his body, still there, exactly as he left it. “Wh—” he starts, but he knows. He knows what this is, that there’s nothing real to justify the reaction of his form.

Aziraphale squeezes his shoulder. “Are you quite all right, my dear?”

Crowley wants to spit that of course he’s not, that this is quite obviously not how people who are all right act, to shove Aziraphale away so he doesn’t have to deal with him crouching next to him, radiating concern. He backs against the concrete, lets the cold of it seep through his pyjamas. “Yeah,” he says. He presses his fingertips to his eyelid. “Fine.”

His hands have started shaking and all he can see behind his retina is flame.

Fire and flame.

The world will end in fire and flame.

“Why are you on the floor?” Aziraphale says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper, but it still sounds loud, echoing off the walls the same way Crowley’s pulse is bounding off the bones of his skull. “There’s a perfectly good bed right there, you know.”

Crowley grits his teeth against the false, soft levity.

“Perhaps I should get you some water.”

“Glasses are in the kitchen. Cupboard next to the painting.”

Aziraphale frowns. Maybe he meant to miracle some but Crowley glares at him.

Aziraphale rests on his heels before finally rising, shoots a glance at Crowley from halfway across the room, and another from the doorjamb, before disappearing into the hall.

Crowley breathes out, hoping the tense, jittery feeling will disappear with the air from his lungs. He makes fists of his hands, willing them not to tremble the same way he would bid a wilful rosebush to bloom.

_You will not shake._

_You will not shake._

His hands are the easy part. It’s the expression chiselled onto his face which won’t comply. He tries to smooth it out, but it remains fixed in watchful terror, held in place by the images which are no longer flashing in his head, but have left enough of an impression that they might as well be. He fists his hair, screws his eyes closed as Aziraphale comes back into the room.

Aziraphale sinks to his knees, his face carefully schooled, even though he’s radiating alarm. He offers Crowley the tumbler. “Here. Drink this.”

Crowley takes a sip. It feels like swallowing glass, but he takes another one in the hope it’ll make Aziraphale stop looking at him like that.

“What—happened?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“But you were—”

“I’m fine.”

“Crow—”

“I _said_ I’m fine.”

Aziraphale looks away, in a way that suggests he won’t push it but he knows Crowley’s not.

And a moment ago, that’s what Crowley was angry about, that Aziraphale didn’t know he wasn’t ok, but now here he is, showing concern, and it’s the last thing Crowley wants. It’s like there are two thoughts inside him, pulling in different directions, what he wants the rolling result of their match rather than something fixed and definitive.

He clings to the glass, focusing on the coolness against his palms, reminding himself that this is reality and the rest is just thoughts. He checks the window and the door again. They’re alone, and the city is quiet, the way it only is just before dawn. His face unknots a little and he sees Aziraphale note it.

“Better? At least a little?”

Crowley nods, short and sharp.

“Good.”

It strikes Crowley all at once that they’re in his bedroom. Aziraphale must’ve heard him, might’ve thought he was actually under attack and burst in accordingly. “Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to—”

“It’s perfectly all right. I’m glad I was here. Do you want to—” Aziraphale spreads his hands between them, as if half expecting Crowley to bite his head off. “—sit up for a while, perhaps? Together?”

“I’ll be bad company.”

“Nonsense. You wouldn’t know how.”

Crowley tilts his head, trying to fathom how to reply, but Aziraphale has already taken it as a yes and miracled them a blanket each. They’re knitted and cosy-looking and absolutely did not come from anywhere in Crowley’s flat. He stiffens as a pillow that definitely wasn’t there before appears behind him.

Aziraphale settles back next to him, close but not touching, with a book. “It’s a romance,” he says, catching Crowley’s gaze land on the cover, “although I fear the protagonist and his paramour aren’t best suited.”

“Why’s that?” Crowley says. It takes such effort to form the words, it’s as if he’s never used a human mouth before.

“They bicker terribly.”

“We bicker.”

A smile quirks Aziraphale’s face. “We bicker collaboratively. For the greater good. They bicker like… I don’t know, like… small children who don’t like each other. Here, I’ll read some to you and you’ll see it’s quite different.”

He flicks the book open and thumbs to find his page, laying it in his lap. His reading voice is soft but animated, with one voice for the protagonist, another for the narrator, and a third for the paramour, and he starts with a passage about a dinner party at the house of a duke where a lively debate has broken out across the blancmange. 

Crowley can’t tell if the couple are bickering, because he’s not listening. He’s watching as, slowly, with utmost caution, Aziraphale takes his hand.

* * *

When he wakes, Crowley’s alone in a pile of blankets and pillows, with a glass of water next to his head. It’s been refilled. Recently, from the smell of it.

Crowley stares at it for a long moment before sitting up.

He didn’t imagine it, then.

They’re back.

He should’ve expected it, probably. Not that expecting it would’ve done much good. He’s yet to find a way to stop it happening, other than not sleeping, which makes him increasingly cranky the longer he leaves it.

He changes his clothes to something which makes him feel less exposed than his pyjamas. It makes his throat tighten to think of Aziraphale watching over him as he slept, of himself clinging to his hand like it alone could guard against the contents of his own mind. He rubs at his eyebrow and puts on his glasses before stepping out into the hall, where the concrete bounces the sound of Aziraphale’s voice to him.

“Now, I just wanted a quick word—”

Crowley follows the sound of it to the plant room, where Aziraphale is standing, back turned to the doorway, his hair illuminated by the incipient morning sunlight that falls in shards through the skylight. He’s talking to a ficus Crowley has had for almost 19 years. It was a twig when he got it, really. Dropped its leaves a few times before it learnt to behave itself. He doesn’t have a favourite, as such, but he tolerates its disobedience more than the others.

“We must all be extra specially nice to Crowley this morning,” Aziraphale says, gesturing at the trees with a plant mister. “He had a bad night, I’m afraid, so if everyone could just grow quietly, that would be most appreciated, I think.” He gives the ficus a single, uncertain spritz. “Er—there we go. Right we are.”

“Morning.”

Aziraphale clutches the plant mister to his chest as he spins around. “Oh, Crowley. Good morning.” He fumbles the plant mister onto the rim of the planter as if he’s glad to have a reason to put it down and advances on Crowley. “You’re… quite well? I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

Crowley shakes his head and backs towards the kitchen, Aziraphale following close by.

There’s another book on the table along with a teapot Crowley’s certain he doesn’t own.

“Would you like a cup? It’s fresh. Chamomile.”

Crowley shakes his head and goes over to the coffee machine. He fishes a mug out of the cupboard and punches at the machine’s chrome buttons until it gurgles into life.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. I’m fine.”

The mug starts to fill with Crowley’s preferred strength of coffee, which is just above rocket fuel and just below the espresso served in French restaurants. He’s not sure how to do this, how to deal with concern rolling over his shoulder before he’s even had his coffee, so he decides to just pretend it’s not happening. “Was thinking—how about we get out of London for a bit today? Blow out the cobwebs.”

“Are you sure you’re up to it?”

Crowley glances across the kitchen. “Don’t fuss, Aziraphale,” he says, with just a note of warning.

Aziraphale opens his mouth as if to say something like _asking is not fussing_, then instead, says, “Where did you have in mind?”

* * *

The countryside lays itself out for them like a blanket, one stitched together from fragments of old wax jackets and corduroys and cagoules. The hedgerows make seams between the fields, and in the distance, the clouds are rolling like lazy sheep across the horizon under a tepid grey sky. 

They wander, aimlessly, elbows brushing, coats rustling against each other, through a little village with quaint shops selling kitchen gadgets and fabric and homemade scones. There are bookshops too, of course, both second-hand and modern, and Aziraphale peers through the window of each of them in turn. 

Crowley leans on the window in front of a display of fake orange foliage and toadstools.

“What do you think?” Aziraphale says. “Now I’ve nothing else to do, I rather think I’ll actually have to sell things. I wondered about doing something with the window.”

Crowley lifts an eyebrow.

“I don’t relish it,” Aziraphale says. “But I can hardly expect Heaven to pay me forever.” He takes in Crowley’s expression. “You think Hell will keep paying your demonic wages?”

“ ‘Course. What would they tell payroll? That I resigned? Retired? Am on gardening leave?” Crowley folds his arms. “I doubt they want the entire accounts department to know they’ve allowed me to go rogue—everyone knows how much gossip starts in accounts. Imagine the uproar if it got out a demon could just… leave and do what they wanted? And Heaven are probably more nervous about _that_ than my lot. Nothing they like less than an angel who’s stopped falling in line. Better all round to pretend it didn’t happen.”

Aziraphale lifts an eyebrow. “I suppose,” he says.

Having ascertained that Aziraphale has taken all he wants to from gazing through the window, Crowley pushes off the wall.

“Take some getting used to, won’t it,” Aziraphale says, “the thought we can just… do anything we want, now?”

“No apocalypse to divert anymore, no Anti-Christ to think about, you mean?” Crowley says. “Remind me. What did we do before that?”

Aziraphale falls into step beside him, his hands clasped behind his back. “I can’t recall,” he says. “I expect it felt very pressing at the time.”

They find a pathway that winds down a cobbled hill between tiny terraced cottages and leads to a squat church. At the bottom, past the graveyard, are fields, and they follow a hedgerow bristling with the last of the blackberries and mop heads of myrtle, heading towards another small run of cottages that look like they belong in a Samuel Palmer painting.

It’ll be winter soon enough; Crowley thinks abstractedly about what this one will look like, indulges a fancy about Aziraphale and a cocoa, a book, and a roaring fire. He never thought he’d end up here, in Sussex of all places, perusing the bookshops and thinking whimsically about a little pub with tankards over the fireplace and local cider on tap.

Not that he thought about the future much at all, really. He’s spent most of his existence just trying to get to the end of the day or the night or the week, the knowledge that at some point the world would end hanging loosely over him like a promise. There’s no roadmap for what comes next. No one to ask, no memo from Head Office telling him this way from that.

This must be what it’s like for humans, he thinks. They’re born and they grow and then it’s just a load of deciding things until Death comes. Maybe that’s why some of them welcome him, when he comes. Finally something they don’t have a say on.

“It’s lovely here.” Aziraphale glances over and smiles. “Just what we needed, I think, after everything.”

They carry on a little way down the hedgerow, and Crowley picks up the smell of hops. “Is there a brewery?” he says.

“Oh that would be fun. We could do an ale tasting. Get some lunch, sit outside at a picnic table to enjoy the last of the good weather.”

Crowley mumbles a reply and Aziraphale glances at him so fast it practically bounces off the side of his head. “We could… talk, then.”

“We _are_ talking, Aziraphale.”

“Yes, I know. But… really talk.” Aziraphale’s tone aims for breezy but Crowley can tell he’s carefully weighing every word. “I wondered, now you’ve had some fresh air—and say no, of course, if you’d rather not, but—I rather wondered if you… might like to talk about… what happened last night.”

Crowley’s pretty sure he doesn’t mean dinner, or the stars, or Aziraphale kissing his fingers in the hall, and for once he would genuinely prefer an in-depth tete-a-tete about literally any of those things. “What is there to say about it?”

“I don’t know. Normally you find quite a lot to say about everything.”

Crowley sighs, watching the trees a bit further down the road as a gust swirls through them and makes them shed leaves for the breeze to pick up and dance with.

Aziraphale’s gaze is assessing, and he waits a moment and then tries, “Has it… happened before?”

Crowley looks down.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Aziraphale says.

“Then don’t pry.”

“It’s just—it’s never happened at the bookshop when you’ve dozed off, or when you’ve caught forty winks at the theatre.”

“Would’ve made quite a scene if it had,” Crowley mutters. “Never mind Richard II on a moped if someone’s screaming the place down.”

He remembers meeting once at the cinema, on the excuse of hiding in the crowd there. They sat in soft, red chairs. Aziraphale bought ice cream in a tiny cup with a miniature plastic spade, and popcorn for Crowley. They watched _Dances With Wolves_ and, after a string of sleepless nights, as it happens, Crowley nodded off, woke up with the credits rolling and his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder. Neither of them mentioned it, but as they stood, Aziraphale worked his arm with his fingers, as if it were stiff for having kept perfectly still longer than it was used to.

“If you don’t want to stay at mine again,” Crowley says, “if it’s too distracting—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Just that—if it’s often—I wondered—why? Or—how? Or—if there’s anything I might do.”

Crowley plucks a leaf from a tree that hasn’t yet fully turned, releasing the scent of fresh green into the air. He read somewhere that the smell is to warn other plants, that when humans go cuckoo for the smell of freshly mown grass, what they’re actually savouring is a plant sounding the alarm. Not that the grass, once alerted, can do anything about it. It can’t run away or change its fate.

Crowley knows how that feels. He can talk about this until the cows come home, he can split himself open and spew it all out, how his thoughts are sometimes so dark and twisted they terrify him even though he created them, but it won’t make a blind bit of difference. There’s nothing he can do about it, and nothing Aziraphale can do about it, either. “It’s nothing,” he says.

“It’s quite clearly not nothing. You’ve been _very_ quiet today and—”

“I told you, I’m fine.”

“— you said it gave you cobwebs and—”

“It’s really no big—”

“Oh for Heaven’s sake, Crowley.” Aziraphale catches his arm and tugs him to a standstill. “Or actually no, not for Heaven’s sake—nor for Hell’s, either—for yours and for mine—” His fingers dig into Crowley’s sleeve. “—_please_ let me care about you.”

“How am I stopping you?” Crowley tosses the leaf into an elderflower bush. “Care all you want, just—do it quietly so I don’t have to deal with it on top of everything else.”

Aziraphale leans back, fingers sliding away.

Crowley stares at the trees.

The quiet, non-response is worse, somehow, than being shouted at.

He skips his gaze up the hill, catalogues each different kind of tree in turn: ash and oak and pine and rowan, beech and hawthorn and horse chestnut. They’re decked in the last showing of their autumn colours, sprinklings of yellow and orange still among the brown. It’s always been his favourite time of year. One of nature’s great miracles, autumn, the way that without any planning, the trees and shrubs coordinate an explosion of different hues. He’s not sure whose idea it was to make the loss of chlorophyll so aesthetically appealing, but they should get a commendation.

“Please, Crowley.”

Crowley squeezes his hands into his pockets.

Maybe he could give whoever came up with autumn the award he got after the flood. That was the first time he woke up screaming. It took him a while to put it together, that it wasn’t the trips back to Hell and the uncharacteristic look of surprise on Beelzebub’s face as he reported it, it wasn’t rehashing it for the edification of other demons who sat and took notes, or being misattributed credit for it, but the thing itself.

He’d thought himself beyond feeling.

Demons didn’t feel. They didn’t _care_.

But he did. And he paid for it, one sleepless, screaming night at a time.

Normally Crowley is good with silence. And ok, ones with Aziraphale are harder, but he has his ways of coping. Skulking around Soho, for example, performing minor acts of annoyance just so Aziraphale can feel him out there. Doing stuff. Being fine. Being demonic.

But a lot of the time he isn’t fine.

And sometimes he doesn’t feel especially demonic, truth be told.

It’s always worse when he feels like that, as if the shell that normally protects him has cracked open. Maybe that’s why this silence and the way Aziraphale’s still looking at him has started to pick at the edges of him, like it’s trying to pull him apart.

“No,” he says.

Aziraphale shoots him a quick, worried glance.

“S’not often. It… comes in waves.” Crowley shakes his head, shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. “It’ll pass, it always does. I’ll get you some earplugs.”

“You will do no such thing,” Aziraphale says, and something tightens in Crowley’s chest. He thinks Aziraphale will push for more, but he doesn’t, just leans in, eyes twinkling and says, “What do you say to seeing if we can’t find that brewery, hmm?”

Crowley sighs his agreement, and they walk in companionable silence through the wood, over the rise and fall of a hill, and down to a little stream at the bottom. It’s a peaceful place. Squirrels interrupting their frolicking with a bit of nut-burying, old signposts grown over with lichen, that sort of thing.

They follow a fork in the path and a memory slides over the top of the trees: picking a stone, worrying it between his fingers, tossing it into the stream. “I came through here before,” Crowley says.

“Oh, really?”

Crowley looks around. “There was an oak with knots in the trunk—looked like a choir, singing for their lives—look, there, that one.” He points right in front of him at the aged, gnarled trunk that must’ve stood there for centuries. “Seventy years ago, give or take. Yeah, this is definitely the place. I came here to—”

He came here to get away from the bombs.

And also to brood about Aziraphale.

He sat on a log and threw stones into that bubbling water, trying to work out what to do about the whispers he’d heard about a bookseller who specialised in volumes of prophecy consorting with a couple of midlevel German spies.

He’d stayed out of the war until that point. Well, apart from a few demonic interventions to prevent bombs falling on places kids who hadn’t yet been evacuated used to congregate. He’d been hauled in for it, reminded that the wars of men were no concern of Hell. Traumatised children, he’d argued, were a potential growth area, and when that went over like a pint of cold custard—largely because no one else knew what a growth area was— he’d posited that the mounting frustrations of pilots and commanders at not achieving their mission goals did equal if not greater damage. After all, faced with the failure of regular bombs, people would just invent bigger, more devastating ones, wouldn’t they?

“Elderly dog walker mistook me for a deserter,” Crowley says.

“They what?”

“Emerged from a hedge, right over there,” Crowley says, gesturing a little way off to a broken fence that’s been mostly consumed by undergrowth. “Shaking their walking stick, they were, and telling me in no uncertain terms that if they found me cowering in their chicken coop like the coward I evidently was, there’d be hell to pay.”

“A bold thing to threaten _you_ with.”

“Was rather.”

“What did you do to them?”

Crowley sniffs. “Nothing major.”

_Technically_ it had been a temptation. Technically encouraging an elderly dog walker to join the Home Guard was inciting violence, even if it _had _led to Crowley dawdling through a confession about a friend he hadn’t spoken to in ages, someone who he was worried would get themselves blown up. Should he intervene if he wasn’t certain it’d be welcome?

_Friend’s a friend_, the dog walker said. _These days any of us should count ourselves lucky to have someone looking out for us. _

Crowley thought he’d picked here at random: a name on a map, a place he’d read about in a guide book years ago and thought sounded quaint, but like so much in his life, it feels like a piece of a puzzle he’s just been handed.

A message about friendship?

Or cowardice?

He’s probably reading too much into it; the thing about not being privy to all the workings of God’s machinations is it tends to fuck with your concept of your own determinism.

“Lost in happy memories?” Aziraphale says.

“Dunno.”

Aziraphale loops his arm through Crowley’s, and when Crowley doesn’t object, tucks himself into Crowley’s side. “Well I’m glad you brought me along, anyway.”

* * *

They don’t find the brewery, but they do chance upon a little pub redolent of the Red Lion for a spot of rather late lunch. Mercifully the conversation doesn’t include Crowley’s nocturnal activities, sticks to the well-worn path of the bookshop and the rather newer one of visual merchandising.

After Aziraphale has polished off his shepherd’s pie and chocolate cheesecake, they drive back to London.

By the time they get back to the flat, it’s dark, and it’s only when Crowley’s unlocking the door that he realises he didn’t ask if Aziraphale wanted dropping somewhere, just assumed they were both coming back to his.

“Would you mind if I made cocoa?” Aziraphale says. “It’s gotten rather chilly.”

“Not at all.”

“Want one?”

“No thanks.”

Aziraphale bustles about the kitchen and Crowley turns the heating on and listens to the little clinks and gentle humming of him, thinking vaguely about how different it is to have noise here of which he’s not the source. It must’ve been like that for Aziraphale when Crowley started staying at the shop. He didn’t appreciate it at the time, what it meant that Aziraphale just let him be in his space, that never once did he shoo Crowley home to make way for someone or something else.

Aziraphale appears in the doorway with an armful of blankets and his mug, and at Crowley’s questioning look, says, “I thought you’d want to retire.”

“It’s half past seven.”

“Is that too early? I’m not entirely sure how sleeping works.”

Crowley’s not entirely sure how _this_ works, how to navigate his existence with someone else so closely tangled in it, how to explain that he wasn’t planning to sleep tonight so much as drink an awful lot of whisky and try not to think too much.

“No harm being a little cosier, until you’re ready?”

“Aziraphale—”

“I’m not fussing,” he says, lifting the blankets. “Now, where would you like to settle?”

Crowley wants to protest. He’s been coping with this just fine on his own; he’s not a child who needs a nightlight and a soothing lullaby. But Aziraphale’s face is hopeful, eagerness just tempered with nerves. Crowley gestures to the plant room.

“Ah, a change of scenery,” Aziraphale says. “Good idea.”

“I’m going to get a drink.”

Crowley digs a bottle and a glass out from the hidden cupboard in his study and by the time he joins him, Aziraphale has arranged something of a nest underneath the planters, taken off his coat, and hung it up on a hook that Crowley’s certain wasn’t there before next to the blind.

The plant room at night has stars for a ceiling. The occupants shift in surprise when Crowley enters, those that fold up as daylight fades lower their foliage as if for inspection, but Crowley waves them off and sits down. He takes a pillow from Aziraphale and leans with his back to the corner, even though it makes him feel like one of those demons he used to see sometimes who specialise in unsettling humans at bedtime. They creep into houses, clinging to the walls, becoming almost one with the shadows and making sinister shapes out of the curtains. Sleep deprivation is a tried and tested method of sending humans over various edges, but Crowley always detested it. Some things should be sacred. Temptation and yielding to it should be accomplished during business hours, as far as he’s concerned.

“Want one?” he says, lifting the bottle at Aziraphale. “It’s the good stuff. Twelve years old.”

He sloshes some into the glass and knocks it back, pours another one even as it’s burning on its way down.

Aziraphale tugs the bottle out of Crowley’s hands. “Then treat it nicely, not like some cheap corner shop wine,” he says. He pours himself a measure into his cocoa and pointedly screws the lid back on the bottle. “Cheers.” He clinks his mug against Crowley’s glass.

Crowley takes a sip. It burns less than the first but it’s still harsh without the cushion of an evening’s drinking to land on.

“Better?” Aziraphale says.

Crowley takes another sip. “Not yet.”

He can feel it behind his eyes.

Bookshop.

Heat.

Why can’t his brain let it go? They had a lovely day and Aziraphale is right there, under a palm tree.

He’s fine.

They’re both fine.

“Shall I read for a little while?” Aziraphale says. “I do believe our hero is about to propose and probably be rebuffed.”

“Sure,” Crowley says.

He doesn’t care about the proposal or the rebuffing, but Aziraphale’s voice is better than his thoughts.

Crowley lets time slip by, resisting the temptation for his eyes to slide closed, trying to follow the story and occasionally getting distracted, asking questions about why the hero thinks a certain thing or is doing a certain thing which anyone can see is foolish. Aziraphale answers them all with good humour, lighting up like he’s pleased to talk about the minutiae of a marriage arrangement or etiquette they’ve both forgotten used to apply.

When they reach the end of a chapter, Aziraphale checks his pocket watch. “What time is a good sleeping time?”

“What time is it now?”

“A little after midnight.”

“Later, then,” Crowley says.

He’s in no hurry to wake with his heart pounding and blood racing through his head, needing to clutch the knees of his pyjamas to ground himself in the feel of the silk as he tells his stupid, corporeal form to calm down. What do bodies need all these nerves for anyway?

So they can feel pain?

Who thought that was a good idea?

If there’s pain, last thing you want to be able to do is feel it.

Crowley scrambles to his feet. One of the palms has a frond that looks like it might, in a few days, turn yellow. He inspects it, tugging the leaf down, ignoring the quiver that passes down the plant and onto its neighbours.

“Yellow is one step from brown and dried, my friend,” he says, “and you know how I feel about that.” He reaches for the plant mister and sprays it liberally, watching as the droplets form and run down the stems. “I’m giving you a chance,” he says. “Make the most of it.” Crowley sprays the other palms, too, one by one, assessing each for infractions. “That goes for the rest of you as well.”

It’s only when he’s done the entire room that he realises Aziraphale isn’t reading anymore, but watching him, hand poised on the whisky bottle, his mouth slightly parted as if he started a word and then forgot it. Crowley reaches down for the glass he abandoned on the floor and holds it out. “Make yourself useful,” he says.

Aziraphale’s face flickers towards a smile that never quite forms, but he unscrews the lid on the bottle and pours Crowley another, anyway.

Crowley leans against the wall, plant mister resting against his thigh, glass in the other hand. He checks the shadows. Not for demons—he’d know if someone was actually here—but for shadows that, if he allowed himself to doze off, he might wake and _think_ are demons. That’s the thing about it, it’s insidious. His fear of the fear is equal to the fear itself.

“You’re avoiding it.” Aziraphale pours another whisky into his mug. “You’re avoiding going to sleep in case you have another bad dream.”

Warlock used to have bad dreams. Crowley would sit with him, get him a glass of milk and a biscuit, and wait until the care melted from his face. Of course, having been fed a diet of historical horrors, death, and destruction, Warlock didn’t fear the things other children might. There weren’t monsters under his bed, there was abandonment. What if Dad leaves and we have nowhere to live? What if we go back to America and I don’t know anyone there? What if I go everywhere and there’s nowhere to belong?

Crowley wishes the thing keeping him up was a future that might never exist, rather than a past which definitely had. “They’re not dreams,” he says, leaning hard into the coolness of the wall.

“No? What are they, then?”

Crowley shrugs. How’s he supposed to explain that his body reacts as if the things he’s seeing are actually happening, and even when he wakes, when he knows it’s not real, his body carries on exactly as if it were? He sees flames; he’s cold but his body sweats with the intensity of it. He feels the weight of the rushing air as if he’s falling; he knows he’s not moving but his lungs gasp for breath and his hands flex as if he can brace for hitting the sulphurous ground. He thinks he’s drowning, trying to save people as they swim for the Ark knowing if he does he’ll be punished; he’s on dry land, not even a dripping tap anywhere around.

He lets his gaze fall to where Aziraphale’s legs are stretched out, his feet bare. It’s the first time Crowley has seen his toes since… Rome, maybe, and he’s stricken with the impulse to fall upon them with kisses until he forgets who he’s supposed to be.

“You know,” Aziraphale says, “I always rather envied you the ability to sleep.”

Crowley looks up, and behind Aziraphale, the plants shrink back towards the wall.

“I didn’t know that it could be so… fraught with complications.”

“Hmm.” Crowley swirls his drink in his glass. “What do you do with your thoughts, if you don’t sleep?”

“My thoughts?”

“You just think all the time? Constantly? About _everything?_”

Aziraphale considers him, shoulders lifting in a shrug.

“What about the ones you don’t want to be thinking?” Crowley says. “The painful ones, the… uncomfortable ones, the ones you want to never have to think again as long as you exist, only you can’t stop them from coming back?”

Aziraphale’s forehead rumples. “I suppose I just think about other things. Nicer things.”

Crowley sniffs at the contents of his glass. He should’ve known Aziraphale wouldn’t get it. Right up until recently, he looked upon horror and carnage and whatever doubts he had, he always believed it was right. That on some level, those suffering deserved it.

Crowley takes a swig of his whisky, and as he swallows, he realises that actually, that’s not true.

Right after he left the Ambassador’s, right after all the… picnic business, he went to Dublin: minister to tempt, discord to sow, a convenient excuse to get out of London for a while.

He tried, with the minister.

Well, he tried enough that failing wouldn’t get flagged if anyone bothered to review his notes, half-heartedly waiting for Aziraphale to turn up and cancel his efforts out. When that didn’t happen, he went on a pub crawl, took in all the sights—the Guinness museum, the James Joyce statue, Samuel Beckett’s old house, the Oscar Wilde memorial.

And there, a memory caught him by surprise.

Paris, just after it was liberated.

They were in search of somewhere to have breakfast before they went their separate ways, talking about nothing in particular when Aziraphale caught his arm. ‘Is this..?’ He looked about the place—they were passing a graveyard, Crowley realised—and, finding something to answer his own question, Aziraphale darted between headstones and crooked stone angels throwing themselves upon the ground. ‘Oh it is, look.’

Crowley looked.

He looked at a tomb that rose above the others, a carved head resembling something from Egypt, picking out the inscription:

_His mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn._

Oscar Wilde.

‘Did you know him?’ Crowley asked.

‘Only to say hello to.’ Aziraphale miracled a posy of green carnations, laying them down on the stone, fussing until he was happy with the way they sat. ‘I was—a fan, you might say.’ He tugged up a couple of weeds that had grown up around the base and tossed them into the undergrowth. ‘Still.’ He stared at the grave, eyes roving, looking for something which didn’t appear to be there. ‘He left rather a hole in the world.’

‘Unconscionable, what they did to him.’

‘Yes, rather.’

Aziraphale straightened, brushing his trousers and rearranging his coat.

And Crowley waited for the accusation, the question that implied that somehow the trial and everything that came after, the ripples through society, were his doing.

But it didn’t come.

’Is he—’ Aziraphale had needed a moment to find the right words, before pointing at the ground. ‘Is he alright down there?’

The question lingered on the air for a long moment, before Crowley answered. ‘I’ll check for you.’

‘Oh, would you?’

‘It’s not my department, but I’ll see what I can do. Put in a word.’

In Dublin, the memory of Aziraphale’s smile had Crowley accepting the offer of a bottle of Poitín in a bar where things weren’t entirely on the up-and-up, and he woke two days later with the worst headache he’s had in six thousand years. Now, he realises something which makes him wish for another bottle: Aziraphale didn’t ask if Crowley was responsible for what happened to Oscar Wilde, because he knew it was Heaven.

Crowley lets his head thunk back against the wall.

“Where have you gone?” Aziraphale says, very quietly.

“Paris. Dublin. Doesn’t matter, it’s always the same place.”

The stars look down on him and Crowley remembers sneaking into Hell in the dead of the night, checking the folders, the relief when he read the report, that he wouldn’t have to lie to Aziraphale about Oscar being fine.

Or as fine as it’s possible to be in Hell.

“Thinking?” Aziraphale says, quiet and cautious.

The word makes Crowley feel made of glass.

“Perhaps,” Aziraphale says, quieter still, “if you were to… let some of it out?”

Crowley lets his gaze fall down. “What, now?”

“Why not?”

Crowley waves his glass at Aziraphale’s book. “Because it’s… the middle of the night and you’re… reading.”

“The good thing about books, Crowley, is the words don’t expire when you put them down.”

Crowley looks away and whatever face he’s making causes the kentia palm to shiver. “If I tell you,” he says, “if I tell you what I think about, if I tell you what makes me wake up screaming, I can’t take it back. You’ll always know. Are you sure you want that?”

Aziraphale swallows.

No doubt he’s trying to imagine what horrible, unforgivable things Crowley might have done, something worse than all the things he knows about, all the things he was there for. Maybe he’s weighing the World Wars or the Black Death or mechanical pencils with lead that’s broken all the way down, tripping through crimes both human and celestial to work out what would keep someone like Crowley up at night.

With a grim, determined smile, he nods.

Crowley takes a drink.

Now it’s come to it, to forming the words, he’s not sure he can, but he’s rather backed himself into a corner. “I—” He falters, takes another gulp of whisky, telling himself it’s helping. “It’s people.”

“People?”

Now they’re talking about it, Crowley doesn’t want to talk about it.

Or—not them. Not the anguished faces. Not the drowning and the suffering and those pleading for mercy he couldn’t grant because he was no longer part of Heaven.

But there is something he wants Aziraphale to have, something that might make him understand why Crowley can’t just think of something nicer to make it all go away.

“And the fire,” he says. “Last night, that’s what it was. The fire. At the bookshop. It didn’t really happen—or it did and then it didn’t again—but I was there. And now it’s in my head.”

“Fire can’t hurt you though, can it?”

“Losing someone can.”

Aziraphale rocks back, rather as if he’s been shot.

Crowley wants to look at him and not, all at the same time. He allows himself to gaze up through the skylight. The stars are not comforting. They don’t help him navigate like they do sailors or people with a voice on the dashboard telling them left, right, straight on. They remind him that he’s a tiny cog in an infinite machine.

Maybe _that_ should be comforting, but even the tiniest cog bears responsibility to those directly next to it, and one broken tooth can bring the entire thing grinding to a halt or spinning out of control.

That’s the thing about the universe. The interconnectedness of it.

If Aziraphale had gone, forever, Crowley would’ve had to go on without him as part of a universe inalterably changed, forever feeling that broken tooth jarring against his side, wildly out of synch because of it.

“I was there and I thought you were gone,” he says.

“What a burden for you to bear,” Aziraphale says. His tone is gentle but also distant, like a priest at a funeral offering soft, consoling words to crying relatives about a person he never met.

“I thought you were _gone_,” Crowley says, more emphatically, because he needs Aziraphale to really understand it, to feel the depth of it, that this wasn’t some fleeting moment of grief: he felt it the way he would if he’d carried it for centuries. He felt it the same way he still feels about the children who were washed away and replaced by a rainbow; he felt it as if it were _his_. “Want to talk about something to keep you up a night? Fuck demons lurking in the curtains—how about knowing that if you hadn’t fallen, if you hadn’t asked so many questions, you’d have been able to do _something_?”

The palms shrink away from him, folding tight into themselves. He sets the plant mister down with a harsh clink on the edge of the planter. “But I had to know, didn’t I? I always have to know.”

And then there it is, right on the tip of his tongue, the thing that’s been eating at him for centuries: it’s his fault, isn’t it? It’s his own fault he was powerless, that he had to just stand by and watch Heaven do its thing, just like it’s his fault he and Aziraphale weren’t always on the same side.

“And the thing is, the thing that really gets me is—I never even—”

The words fall away on his tongue. He shakes his head, annoyed with himself for carrying on with what feels like an unwanted confession.

_I never even told you._

_I never had the chance to tell you. _

_You could’ve ceased to exist and you never would’ve known. And then what was it all for?_

“But that’s not true, is it?” Crowley mutters. “There were hundreds of chances to tell you. Thousands, probably.” He balls his hand. “But I wasted them. That dog walker guy in the hedge, he was right about me. I am a coward.”

“Crowley— ”

“Don’t argue with me. This isn’t some quaint bickering from one of your novels.”

The words just hang for a moment and now they’re out, Crowley’s not even sure they make sense.

There’s a rustle, and Aziraphale shuffles over on his knees, halts right in front of Crowley, as if he might pray at the altar of him. “Crowley—you _did_.” Aziraphale takes Crowley’s hand, where it’s still balled and pressed hard, so hard against his thigh, covers it with both of his own. “You did tell me. And I won’t have you blaming yourself for any of this.”

Crowley stares at the floor. He focuses on the shadow underneath Aziraphale’s knee, because it’s easier than anything else, but specifically easier than looking into what he can tell is an imploring expression.

“Besides,” Aziraphale says, giving Crowley’s hand a gentle tug. “We’re here now.”

“Are we?”

The question hangs for half an eternity.

Crowley doesn’t say anything to make it pass quicker, but he does sink to his knees.

“Let me try something?” Aziraphale says, and he reaches out, lifts his fingers to Crowley’s temple. There, he pauses, giving Crowley the chance to say no.

And a bit of Crowley wants to bat his hand away and shout to be left alone, God, all he wants is to be left alone, doesn’t he?

But curiosity always does get the better of him.

He nods.

Aziraphale lifts the arms of his glasses from his ears, folds them carefully, and lays them on the floor. His fingers graze Crowley’s temple and it’s immediate, the flood of drowsy calm. Something inside him lifts, leaving only the most skeleton memory of itself. It’s a confusing sensation, his brain struggling to keep up with the way his body feels, his heart fluttering not unpleasantly and his limbs soft and cool and heavy.

“What d’you do to me?”

“A little healing, that’s all,” Aziraphale says, and his fingers wander down the side of Crowley’s face to rest on his chin. “Long overdue, perhaps.” He touches Crowley’s jaw. “Come, now.” He guides Crowley in with persuasive fingers, tucking Crowley’s head into the crook of his neck.

It’s not dissimilar to the time Crowley fell asleep on him in the cinema, except for the way Aziraphale is very gently stroking his hair, rain-like calm trickling down from his touch. “Let’s just see if it works.”

* * *

Hell in the dead of night is always disconcerting. The ceiling lights flicker making shadows of everything and the quiet is eerie, makes the ever-present drips rebound, loud and distracting.

Crowley tries the door to Hastur’s office. It slips open after minimal persuasion with a hair grip, a trick Crowley learnt because he was bored and never expected to have actual use for. He slides around the door, leaving it just ajar in a way he hopes will look casual if anyone chances by. 

“Right,” he murmurs, surveying the chaos that passes for Hastur’s desk, “if I were a Hell Hound permit, where would I be?”

He lifts a folder and something like a cross between a slug and woodlouse but bigger—so, so much bigger—crawls out from under it. “Ugh,” he says. Hastur and his pets. He shoves it off the desk with the folder and it slops to the floor and crawls towards the bin, chewing on a mouldering banana skin. That accounts for the smell, at least.

With a feeling of mounting nausea, Crowley shifts a pile of paperwork to the front of the desk, thumbing through the top few layers to try and get a handle on Hastur’s system. The topmost form seems to be some kind of reprimand for joking and below that are personnel files for minor demons being considered for a promotion. Crowley moves around the desk to the filing cabinet.

He’s not even sure what he’s looking for. He couldn’t sleep and his brain convinced him it was worth sifting through Hastur’s notes, see if there was anything labelled _Hell Hound itinerary_ or _name and address of the real Anti-Christ. _Honestly at this point he’d settle for a memo titled _Crowley fucked this up in exactly these fourteen ways_ so long as somewhere in it was a hint as to how to stop this thing before it all gets truly out of hand.

The drawers are divided into C-X, A-B, X-Z, and Crowley tugs open C-X and immediately finds a folder marked A. He lets out a growl of frustration but really, what was he expecting? He tries the middle drawer but it’s empty, ducks down to the final one, which sticks and protests, croaking as he tugs on the handle and wrenches it open. He pulls out a couple of files, hastily flicking through the contents, but one of them is labelled _Hit List 1864 _and the other appears to be, more alarmingly, poetry.

A creak outside.

Crowley freezes.

Another one, closer, and he stands up, grabbing one of the personnel files to construct a lie around. _Thinking about taking on an intern for the end of the World. Valuable experience, don’t you think? Once in a lifetime, you might say. _

The door opens and Crowley fixes his face into a mask of questioning indifference. A head pokes around, weasel skeleton earrings jangling.

“Mavis?”

“Crowley?” Mavis clutches their throat. “Oh thank fuck. Thought it might be Dicknot sleepwalking again. I did not need that tonight—last time I accidentally woke him, he set fire to my favourite stack of Post-It notes.” They finger their belt, where a stapler and another set of Post-Its in various shades of grey dangle from short chains. “What you doing here?”

“Could say the same to you,” Crowley says, sliding the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet closed with his foot in a way he hopes, but honestly doubts, is surreptitious.

“Been assigned to night shift.”

“Night shift? In accounts? How long has that been—a thing?”

“Couple of weeks,” Mavis says. “Backlog innit, ‘cos of the apocalypse. Got to clear it all before the big day.”

“Right.”

Mavis puts their hands in the pockets of their grey cardigan. “Don’t usually get much company. What you—er—” They wave at the folder Crowley’s still holding.

“Oh, me?” Crowley says. “I—lost something. Thought I left it in here after the department meeting.” 

“Did you find it?”

“Not yet.” Crowley adds a token sigh and shuffles more papers across the desk. “Hastur—er—he’s not been moved onto nights too, has he? Only I still haven’t gotten to this report he wanted and—” Crowley shoots Mavis what he hopes is an endearing grimace. “Honestly I’m already having a bit of a day.”

_A bit of a day_ about covers discovering the Anti-Christ isn’t who he thought it was, a Hell Hound has been dispatched to who knows where, and Aziraphale looking at him rather drunkenly and saying, ‘Crowley? It will be all right, won’t it?’

Mavis kicks at the bottom of the desk. “Nah. He left ages ago.”

“Great. Then why don’t we—” Crowley tries a drawer in Hastur’s desk. “Look at that, not even locked,” he mutters, and pulls it out, fishing a bottle from the mess of paperclips and elastic bands. “—have a beer.”

Mavis eyes it as if it might explode.

“He won’t notice,” Crowley says. “Memory like a—waterslide, Hastur. Stuff just… sluices right out of it.”

With caution, Mavis takes the bottle and Crowley fishes out another for himself, knocking the lid off on the edge of Hastur’s desk. “Cheers,” he says, and holds it out for Mavis to clink against.

They do, slugging at the foam that erupts from the neck, wiping their mouth with the sleeve of their grey cardigan. “Satan, I needed that,” they say, and sink down onto a chair that has three legs one length and one another, giving it a permanent rocking motion.

Crowley sits on the edge of the desk, trying not to think about what kind of slimy, crawly creatures might have left trails which are now in proximity to his trousers. He’s very much in need of a beer, too, despite having spent most of the afternoon and a good portion of the evening drinking with Aziraphale. Maybe a beer will help him process that he wasted years, _actual_ years, singing lullabies to an actual human child rather than what he was supposed to be doing, that that whole endeavour was a giant, splendiferous waste of time and all the associated heart…stuff need never have happened. To cap it all, he can’t even be grateful Warlock isn’t the Anti-Christ because that means someone else is and they’ll kill him anyway.

Making him feel better about all that is, he recognises, asking quite a lot of some stewed hops in a nice bottle that he pilfered from his boss.

“Been busy, then?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Mavis says. “Never known anything like it.”

“Armageddon will do that, I suppose.”

Mavis glances across the empty room to the desolate hall. “Bit worried about it all, truth be told.”

Crowley takes a sip of his beer to disguise his interest. “How come?”

“Well I don’t have any combat training, do I?” Mavis shifts in their seat, lowering their voice. “Everyone’s talking about how glorious it’ll be but I don’t see how. S’alright for the likes of Hastur—he can make fire rain down— but how m’I supposed to fight in a war when all I know about is checking spreadsheets and filing?” They lift their stapler. “What am I supposed to do, staple archangels together by their wings? Give ‘em a telling off in the I’m-not-angry-just-disappointed voice I use when someone loses a receipt?” Mavis sighs, short and exasperated. “I’m sure _management _thinks it’ll all be very entertaining, but some of us have never so much as thrown a punch. I don’t want to face an army of angels. Why would I?”

Crowley leans forward. “Have you ever—actually met an angel, Mavis?”

“Don’t want to,” Mavis says, with a shudder. “They sound fucking unbearable.”

Crowley laughs and Mavis sneaks a smile at him from behind their bottle before leaning in too.

“People are saying they can tell the bad thoughts you’re having just by looking at you—turn you to salt or leave you nothing but this sanctimonious shell—just by looking! How’m I supposed to cope with that? Kill me if you must but—my bad thoughts are my entire personality.”

“Oh that’s not true,” Crowley says. “There’s a lot of you that’s not bad.”

“Like what?”

“You’re diligent,” Crowley says, “and always very polite and friendly.”

Mavis huffs. “Fat lot of good it’ll do me.”

Something unexpected twists in Crowley’s stomach. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about the humans, what will happen to the humans, but there’ll be casualties on all sides. Mavis is right. Upper management want their war but it’ll be the desk clerks and the receptionists and the cleaners who pay the ultimate price. 

“Tell you what,” Crowley says, “if it comes to it—if Armageddon _actually_ happens, I’ll look out for you.”

“Why would you do that?” Mavis says, eyes round and grey like a puddle.

“Because we’re friends.”

“We are?”

Crowley holds his bottle out. “We’re having a drink, aren’t we?”

Suspicion wavers across Mavis’s face but Crowley holds their gaze, gestures with his bottle.

Slowly, Mavis clinks against it. “Guess we are.”

“Ask me,” Crowley says, “there’s plenty on both sides who don’t want this. There’ll be a you in angel accounts thinking exactly the same thing—why can’t we all just… carry on as we are?”

“You reckon?”

“Of course. Balance, isn’t it? For every action of Hell there’s an equivalent in Heaven. And you, well, you’ve more in common with that angel in accounting who’s also worried about how to—I don’t know—kick a demon in the stomach than you have with, say, Hastur, haven’t you?”

Mavis considers him. “Never thought about it like that.”

Crowley takes another sip of his beer to let them mull it over a moment longer. There’s a poster on the wall that says _if you think your problems are bad, wait until you see our solutions. _And, well, doesn’t that just about sum the whole thing up?

“You really think there’s an angel version of me?” Mavis says.

“Yeah. There’s angel versions of all of us, more or less. I know an angel, for example,” Crowley says, “who—”

“You _know _an angel?”

It’s risky, confessing this, here and now, but time is running out and if Crowley doesn’t find the real Anti-Christ, it won’t matter who knows that he and Aziraphale used to spend cosy nights in the bookshop. “We—run into each other, now and then. Show up to work on the same person, that sort of thing.”

“And what happens then? Fisticuffs? They try to turn you or—smite you?”

“Hardly,” Crowley says. “Normally we just—let things run their course. Let the human choose, for themselves. Better for both of us, that way.”

Mavis’s puddle eyes grow wider in a mix of admiration and fear. “What they like?”

Crowley shrugs. “Not that different, really. Just—trying to get through the day. Hated the flaming sword they were given so much, they gave it away.”

He rests the bottle against his arm. There’s a lot more he could say about Aziraphale, obviously. He could talk about how he likes human things like books and musicals and sushi, how he likes Crowley too, doesn’t hold being a demon against him.

Or so Crowley believed.

But this is hardly the time or place to show off the cracks in his heart.

“Anyway, my point is, not all angels are blood-thirsty, ready to charge into battle to defeat the forces of darkness at any cost. So if it comes to it—_if_ the war happens, don’t think you’re going to be fighting millions of angels with the equivalent of Hastur’s fervour and his firepower. Because it won’t be like that. It’ll mostly be angels who don’t want to be there anymore than you do.”

Mavis swallows heavily, and after a moment, nods.

“Now,” Crowley says, leaning in, “do you have _any_ idea where I might find the paperwork for the Hell Hound?”


	6. The Book of Love

Aziraphale sits in the kitchen with a pot of tea and a book. It’s different from the one he was reading the previous evening, different to the one he read to Crowley, too. Where are they coming from? How many does he have stashed here?

“Sleep well?” Aziraphale says, when he notices Crowley leaning on the doorframe.

“Like a baby,” Crowley says. “Or—I mean not on my back with my feet in the air and a soft toy for company, making gurgling noises, just—you know. I mean you do know. You were there.” He goes over to the counter, places a mug under the nozzle of the coffee machine, glances across. “I didn’t..?”

“Not a peep.”

Crowley would like to believe it’s as easy as that: one tiny touch of Aziraphale’s fingers and his thoughts are magically healed, but he’s had blissfully undisturbed nights before, so many of them in a row that he forgets there’s anything to be anxious about, only for the screaming to rise from nowhere and take him by surprise. He sips at his coffee and goes to inspect the plants, giving each one a quick once over to check for signs of drooping or discolouration. The almost yellow palm leaf hasn’t gotten any worse and he nods at it, almost approvingly. He reaches up to one of the shelves, takes down a haworthia which has started to stretch towards the window.

“I’ve told you,” he says. “Being lopsided won’t be tolerated.”

He moves it closer to the light. That’s fair, isn’t it? Give it a chance to correct itself. He opens the skylight to let in some fresh air for the palms. They wave their fronds in appreciation and he mists them, watching the spray fall like the gentlest tickle of rain, before heading into the bathroom to tend to the spider plants clustered around the bath and the moss wall.

It takes him a little over an hour to give each of them some water and a pep talk.

When he goes back to the kitchen, Aziraphale closes the volume he was reading, after carefully marking his page with a scrap of paper from one of Crowley’s notebooks. “I thought I’d head to the bookshop for a while. I’ve got a job lot of first edition Thomas Hardy books someone donated to sort through.” He runs his hands over the front cover of the book. “Not to mention you must be quite sick of me.”

Crowley waggles his head at the very idea.

With a little caution, Aziraphale says, “You could come with, of course, if you don’t have anything else on? I mean, if it wouldn’t be too difficult for you.”

“Difficult for me?”

Aziraphale busies himself with the teapot, rinsing it out and setting it on the draining board. “Because of your dreams about the bookshop.”

“I’ve been there, remember?” In six thousand years, little has compared to standing in a building he watched burn, seeing the shelves populated with books he knew were cinders, inhabiting the body which belonged to the person he curled on the floor to mourn. “Doesn’t bother me.”

“Very well, if you’re sure. I’d be glad of the company. Thomas Hardy is rather dreary.” Aziraphale dries his hands on a tea towel with a faded reprint of _Still Life with Pie, Silver Ewer and Crab_ on it, which has materialised in Crowley’s kitchen by not entirely organic means. “Shall we?”

* * *

Soho is quiet. Or as quiet as it ever is. People really bustle, here. It’s as if the word was invented for it.

Aziraphale unlocks the door, letting a shard of sunlight in to illuminate a stripe across the floor that Crowley vividly remembers hitting with his shoulder blades and his head and his arse all at once. Instead of flickering fire, dust motes dance in the sunlight, sparkling for a moment like tiny flaming suns, before spinning into darkness on the edge of the shop floor.

Aziraphale collects the post that’s accumulated underneath the letterbox and unceremoniously dumps the entire lot in the bin.

“Aren’t you going to read those?”

“Whatever for?”

Crowley can’t think of an answer that’s not about wheelie bins. He closes the door behind him and fingers the sign. “Are we… open today?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says. “I rather think we should be. At least for a while. Stock taking this afternoon though, I think. It wouldn’t do to give people the wrong idea.”

The chances of seeing any customers on a quiet weekday morning are pretty slim, but Crowley flips the sign around anyway. “Shall I… put the kettle on, then?”

He makes tea for them both out the back while Aziraphale manoeuvres the box of new arrivals onto the desk. Now he’s here, Crowley can’t imagine the shop burning, even though the entire place is a paper and dust tinderbox. That was how he knew something had happened to Aziraphale, he realises. Aziraphale would’ve given anyone who tried to hurt this place literal, actual Hell were he able to. The place breathes with him.

Crowley drops the teabags into the caddy under the sink and goes out into the shop with their mugs, finding Aziraphale scrutinising the binding and the covers of the Thomas Hardys for stains and foxing, turning each one towards the window to inspect. “_Jude The Obscure_ is a little damaged.”

“Best thing for it,” Crowley mutters into a sip of his tea. “That is the most depressing book I’ve skimmed in a thousand years.”

Aziraphale sets it down on top of the others and lifts an eyebrow, but doesn’t disagree. He takes the mug Crowley offers him with a coy little smile and the brush of their fingers creates a tingle all the way up Crowley’s arm. He swallows. He’s not sure quite what happened last night. It’s like he admitted something but he’s not precisely sure what. “Why would humans want to read about misery happening to other humans, anyway?” he says.

“Makes them feel better about their own, I expect.” Aziraphale blows on his tea. “Misery loves company.”

“Does it, though?”

Aziraphale makes a pensive face. “You never sought the presence of another being for comfort?”

It is, quite obviously, a pointed question.

Crowley’s not sure _comforting_ is the word. Angel magic isn’t comforting, as such. It’s powerful and filled with light, bestows an airy kind of calm, but it’s one that’s as artificial to him as a plug-in room fragrance claiming to be the breeze over a mountain top. “Er—”

Aziraphale rests his mug against his arm and the steam from it rises up to curl about his chin. “Why do you grow so many plants, then?”

Oh. Plants. They’re talking about his plants. “They’re not _beings_.”

“You said they had souls. You said Aristotle said they did.” 

“Yeah but that’s not…” Crowley falters, his relief evaporating. “It’s not literal. They don’t literally have souls. Not _soul _souls. Not like people souls.”

“You think you know more about it than Aristotle?”

Crowley shrugs. “Been on Earth for longer.”

Aziraphale considers him, the way he does sometimes when he’s finding something Crowley said as baffling as a particularly difficult Sudoku puzzle on the back of _The Celestial Times_. “So if you don’t find the plants comforting, why do you keep so many of them, then?”

“I just—” Crowley makes a couple of steps across the floor towards the bookcase. Why are they having this conversation? And why does it make him feel like he’s being turned upside down with his belly exposed? “—do.”

He makes a show of putting his mug on one of the shelves and fingering a travel guide to Devon which went out of date half a century ago. Not that he expects that matters much with Devon. What is there to go for? Attractive rock formations, a moor, and cream teas. They don’t change that much, do they?

He pulls the book down to check.

“But why?”

Crowley ignores him, thumbing through the section on hotels and campsites and charming little B&Bs with a view of the sea.

“It’s a simple enough question, Crowley.”

With a sigh, Crowley turns to face Aziraphale. It might be a simple question but he’s not sure it has a simple answer. “Do you know how many plants there are in Hell?”

“I didn’t see any when I was, you know—” Aziraphale swivels his gaze to the floor and lowers his tone. “—down there.”

“Exactly,” Crowley says, jabbing the book in his direction. “They couldn’t survive because there’s no light. Heaven, on the other hand? Overflowing with light, isn’t it, Heaven. But plants don’t grow there, either. No little ferocactus emoryi on Gabriel’s desk. No collection of jade trees for Michael.”

“That is odd, now I think about it.” Aziraphale lips purse in consideration. “I suppose everyone’s too busy, or they’d make the place look untidy.”

“Right.” Talking about Heaven with Aziraphale is always dangerous, so Crowley keeps to himself that he’s always thought Heaven doesn’t grow things because plants have an inherently rebellious nature. They can be trained, sure, but they can’t truly be controlled or contained without a huge amount of effort. “But here? On Earth? Well—it’s full of all these plants, just merrily growing away. And people call them weeds and pull them up or chop them down and burn them maliciously, but the plants always have the last laugh. You see them, sneaking up through the tiniest crack in the concrete, taking over abandoned buildings even before the gas bill has stopped being paid. They cling to guttering and crawl over burnt-out cars on unloved housing estates, they’ll feed on damp or thrive in a desert. They’re adaptable, resilient—treat a plant terribly, exact all kinds of mistreatment on it, and it’ll still survive if there’s the tiniest little bit of it that remains remotely alive, and—”

“And you like them for it,” Aziraphale says.

“I don’t.”

“They’re your hobby.”

“I don’t have hobbies.” Crowley advances until the book is well and truly in Aziraphale’s personal space. “Demons don’t have hobbies.”

Aziraphale’s mouth forms a straight line, the way it does sometimes when he’s trying not to laugh.

And well at least that confirms it.

It is impossible to be intimidating while brandishing a travel guide to Devon.

Crowley lets the book drop.

“What was the first one?” Aziraphale says. “The first plant you took home.”

“I don’t know,” Crowley says, with a wave. “Spider plant, maybe.”

“And how did you acquire said spider plant?”

“I bought it. I bought it in Homebase.”

“You bought it in _Homebase_?”

“I was in to—” Crowley flips the book open at random. Torquay Harbour, how charming. “—actually I don’t remember.”

“You do.”

Torquay Harbour is, as it happens, nowhere near charming enough to hold his interest. Once you’ve looked at it and thought _oh how charming_ that’s all it has to offer. Crowley snaps the book closed again. “Fine. I was buying a lamp I saw in the window. And it was just sitting there. Spider plant. In a whole… forest of spider plants and macramé hangers. And I thought Anthony J Crowley, maybe he’s the kind of person who would get a spider plant at Homebase. 1979 was a weird year.”

Aziraphale shifts his weight in the exact same way Crowley has seen lawyers in TV dramas do before they deliver the line which proves the witness is lying. “Would that be the same spider plant that’s currently hanging in your kitchen?”

“No, that’s one of its descendants. Main one’s in the bathroom. It… likes the window in there. Too much. Throws out babies like nobody’s business. Annoyingly prolific, is what it is.”

Aziraphale ducks his head into a smile. “Perhaps you could bring me one of the babies,” he says. “For here. If there’s a suitable location for it, I mean. I wouldn’t want it to be unhappy.”

Crowley ignores the debate that’s quite clearly there about whether or not plants can be happy, because his heart is thunking. “You want me to bring you a plant? That I grew?”

“Should it be more than one, in case it gets lonely?”

“They don’t get lonely, Aziraphale.”

“But you keep all of yours in groups.”

Crowley’s jaw tightens. “It’s better for the humidity. And it… looks nicer.”

He opens the book.

Torquay Harbour again. He skims it anyway.

_Perfect place to eat fish and chips and watch the world go by. _Riveting.

But not riveting enough for him not to notice Aziraphale smiling at him from across the shop. “Since you know what they like, you could take care of them for me, when you’re here.”

“I don’t take care of them.”

“Well perhaps you could bring some and… let them merrily grow away, as you so deftly put it.”

Crowley opens his mouth to argue but finds there’s no argument there to let out. “Don’t you have Thomas Hardys to sort?” he says, and stalks off to the leisure section to file Devon amongst the golfing tomes, like it deserves.

* * *

It’s almost lunchtime. Aziraphale has successfully not sold anything to four people, all of whom left in a state of mild bewilderment with directions to the nearest Waterstone’s. “Would you like a sandwich?” Aziraphale calls. “Thought I’d pop to that little delicatessen which has the olive bread before they run out.”

“Not for me.” Crowley sticks his head around the shelf. “Wait. That the place that has the blood orange… thingies?”

“Yes, would you like one?”

“If you wouldn’t mind?”

“Won’t be a jiffy.”

On his way out, Aziraphale flips the sign around to closed, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Crowley likes it here best when there’s no chance they’ll be disturbed by a customer. He runs his fingers along one of the dark wooden shelves, tracing a path in the sprinkling of dust that’s forming from there to Aziraphale’s desk.

The desk itself is in its usual state of thoughtful disarray, with everything arranged precisely: that which Aziraphale is immediately, pressingly interested in sits to the right for easy access, then everything else fans round to the left. When he wants to make more room, he’ll move one of the furthest left-hand items onto the pile next to the desk, and then when that’s full, he’ll re-sort those and distribute them into the mountain range of smaller piles which make a cove halfway back to his chair.

Crowley drums the top of the pile of Thomas Hardys. He’s pretty sure Aziraphale didn’t get very far with sorting through them; actually he’s not sure what sorting they require, beyond affixing with a ludicrous price tag, adding to his inventory ledger, and then sticking on one of the shelves. He lifts the top one, reads the cover.

“_Desperate Remedies_. Well that sounds cheerful.” He opens it to find a quote by someone called Sir W. Scott. “_Though a course of adventures which are only connected with each other by having happened to the same individual is what most frequently occurs in nature, yet the province of the romance-writer being artificial, there is more required from him than a mere compliance with the simplicity of reality._” Crowley holds the book further away. “Oh, what? Three volumes? Fuck off.”

He tosses it down. As it lands on the desk, it dislodges another book, sending it tumbling to the floor. It falls open at its middle. The page is littered with entries like an encyclopaedia, but unlike an encyclopaedia, all the entries are about flowers and each is highly decorated with botanical illustrations.

Crowley crouches and picks the book up. As he turns it over, the embossed cover glints in the sunshine. “Floriography?” he says. “What the H-h-heaving whatnot is floriography?”

He opens it. Flowers adorn each corner of the ornate front plate and words like ‘love’ and ‘forever’ are picked out in the kind of curling script he used to see on greeting cards. The pages are faded with age and the printing date is well back in the 19th Century. He turns the pages of the introduction, skimming the passages of explanation on how to use the book.

_Language of flowers…discretion in pursuits of the heart…for the disclosure of feelings without the mortifying ordeal of personal rejection._

Crowley frowns. Why was this on Aziraphale’s desk in amongst a bunch of Thomas Hardy novels? He’s about to set it aside as some curiosity that was donated alongside them when something slips from between the pages and drifts down to the floor.

A flower.

The small, round face of a violet, in fact.

It stares up at him from the rug.

He lifts it up, considers it in the sunlight. The colour of the petals has bled out and they’re dry as the paper they’ve been sitting in, having been preserved, perhaps, in this very volume. It’s—

He squints at it.

No.

Surely not.

Familiarity, the knowledge that he’s seen not a flower like this one, not merely another violet, but this specific flower before, twists in Crowley’s stomach. It’s the violet Aziraphale tucked in his lapel. It must’ve fallen off when they were arguing. How on Earth did it get here?

Crowley turns the pages, trying to find where it came from so he can put it back, but instead he finds a clover, identical to the one Aziraphale plucked from the banks of the Avon. On another page is a daisy from the knot garden, and then a head from an agapanthus, a tag from a chocolate box which has a tiny sprig of lavender in the corner and Aziraphale’s name on the front in the lady from the chocolate shop’s handwriting. There’s no getting away from it: this is Aziraphale’s book. He must’ve pressed the flowers, mustn’t he, because no one else would’ve—could’ve, even, been in all those places too.

Something pokes out further back. In between two neatly-clipped sheets of tissue paper are the petals from a lilac rose. Crowley remembers the ones around the door at the gardener’s cottage. He must’ve wanted a memento from—

But Crowley grew those. Only did it because Aziraphale made a big fuss of swapping a carnation for one at the pub.

Something tugs on his memory and Crowley flips back to the introduction, to the page which explains how to send a message in flowers, how to construct a bouquet with all the right elements to say exactly how you feel. With his heart thunking and his head flashing with images of the bouquet of lilac roses Aziraphale gave him, Crowley flicks to the index, running his finger down the list.

_Carnation, yellow. Page 43._

He flicks to the page.

_Yellow carnations have almost wholly negative associations: rejection, disdain, and even contempt. They can be useful in expressing displeasure at someone making unwanted romantic advances. _

Crowley turns back to the index.

_Roses, lilac_. _Page 67._

He flips to it.

_While red roses denote true love and must be sent with extreme caution, and only when one is assured one’s affections are returned, other colours offer the sender a way to indicate their burgeoning admiration. Yellow—_

Crowley skims lower. Peach, pink, yes whatever.

His finger stops.

_Lilac, lavender, or pale violet roses send the message: I am enchanted by you (addendum: thornless roses carry the additional message of love at first sight)._

Crowley reads it twice.

And then he has to sit down.

He’s still sitting there, on the floor next to Aziraphale’s desk and his pile of less interesting books, when the door opens. “Well that took rather longer than expected,” Aziraphale says. “The queue was dreadful.”

Crowley hastily stows the book back in the pile of Thomas Hardys and scrambles to his feet.

“What were you doing down there?” Aziraphale says, handing him his can of blood orange fizzy pop.

It’s chilled against Crowley’s fevered, shaking fingers and he clings to it.

Be normal.

Act normal.

Just say something normal.

“Yeah, I—er—sorry, I got into one of the Thomas Hardys. Desperate something or other it’s called. _Fascinating. _Really fascinating_._”

“Oh really?” Aziraphale says, taking a seat at his desk. “I haven’t read that one. What’s it about?”

Crowley tugs on his ear. “It’s—er—hard to explain. Sort of a…treatise on…human interaction?”

He figures most books are about that so it’s a safe enough bet. He pops the ring pull on his can just for something to do that isn’t saying ‘what?’ fourteen hundred times in slightly different ways.

_En_chanted.

En_chant_ed.

Enchant_ed_.

_Really?_

He tilts his head to consider Aziraphale in the context of the word. Perhaps if he thinks the word really hard and looks at him, the two will come together to make something resembling sense. Aziraphale unwraps the paper from around his sandwich and takes a bite, chasing a stray bit of what looks like cress into his mouth with his napkin.

“Well don’t let me interrupt your reading,” he says. “Feel free to carry on. But you hardly need sit on the floor. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable? Settle in for the afternoon?”

Aziraphale looks at him expectantly.

Oh.

Oh great.

Now Crowley’s got to read an entire Thomas Hardy novel. And a three volume one at that.

With a stuttering sigh, Crowley resigns himself to it and swipes the book up off the desk. Exposed, the book on floriography feels like a beacon that would light up the coast enough to do the work of at least two cinque towns, but Aziraphale pays it no attention whatsoever, just smiles as Crowley takes a seat in the armchair. He swings his legs over the arm and rests the book on his thighs, hoping that way Aziraphale won’t be able to see he’s starting at the beginning.

The opening is dreary.

The second page is worse.

By the third, Crowley longs for some kind of apocalyptic intervention. He skips forward, trying to find something mildly diverting, spots a line which has been underlined and highlighted with exclamation marks in the margin in pencil.

_But loving is not done by months, or method, or rule, or nobody would ever have invented such a phrase as ‘falling in love’._

Satan. It’s like being punished for his curiosity all over again. This is it, isn’t it: this is why lying is bad, and wrong, and evil.

Crowley turns the page mechanically, scanning down to pick out a word here, a sentence there, so he can get the gist of it. But nothing will stick. Out in the shop, Aziraphale is humming to himself as he moves through the shelves with his leather bound inventory, and Crowley watches him. Every now and then he stops, peers at a title, adjusts his glasses, and flips the book open, running his finger down the list, nodding or frowning when he finds it.

Enchanted.

Crowley keeps coming back to it.

Could he really be…?

It’s just a lot more than he expected. 

The rest of the day passes without incident, and after Aziraphale has dealt with all the Thomas Hardys except the one Crowley is supposedly reading, they settle in the back of the shop and split a bottle of red wine from Aziraphale’s collection and a dinner of noodles and broccoli from the place down the road. They talk about nothing of any great consequence—Crowley fudges an outline of _Desperate Remedies_ before quickly changing the subject back to the noodles, fascinating history, noodles—until the last of the late night revellers have stopped shouting for taxis outside. 

“Should we… make a move?” Crowley says.

Over the course of the evening, he’s imagined the end of it a dozen different ways: leaving Aziraphale behind and going home alone; both of them going back to his and setting up amongst his palms again; curling up here on the sofa with Aziraphale’s things all around him. Each of them has a hole in it, carved by the word _enchanted_, the desire to make it mean something, although he’s not sure entirely what or how to move from this to it.

Aziraphale’s sofa creaks as he shifts. “I’m quite pooped. We could stay here tonight?”

Crowley concurs with a murmur from his armchair. He’s worked his way so low down, he might not actually be able to get out without a minor demonic miracle so it’s probably for the best. But he likes hearing Aziraphale say it: _we_. The assumption that whatever they’re doing, it’s together.

With a drawn out breath, Aziraphale pushes off the sofa to his feet and collects the tapestry throw from the back of it, folding it over his arm. There are two people—a couple, perhaps—entwined on it amongst a scattering of fruit, which Crowley never noticed before.

Crowley traces them with his gaze and Aziraphale must feel him doing it, because without looking at Crowley, he says, “I thought we might go upstairs.”

Crowley has been upstairs. He’s followed Aziraphale up there to carry on a conversation while Aziraphale was halfway up a ladder placing a volume of poetry out of everybody’s reach. He’s leant on the railing of the balcony to peer down and watch him scurry about on an unexpectedly busy Sunday. He hasn’t slept up there. He didn’t know there was anywhere up there _to_ sleep. He gets to his feet anyway and lets Aziraphale lead him to the hidden staircase that rises up at the end of two long shelves. It’s narrow, dark, but short, and they emerge at the top into a nook. The floor is bare, scrapes in the wood where it looks like furniture might’ve been moved to create it, and as Aziraphale waves at them, wall lights like flickering candles ignite, bathing them both in a soft, orangey glow.

Aziraphale lays the throw down and while Crowley’s inspecting the rest of their surroundings—the towers of books, the paintings on the walls of night skies and rolling landscapes, an advert for clarinet lessons—he produces another couple of knitted blankets and more cushions than Crowley can count. He arranges them into a nest between the wall and the back of a bookcase, and looks over with a would-be casual, “Alright?”

_Nervous, actually,_ Crowley thinks. _And a bit ridiculous for being nervous. _“Fine, why?”

“Nothing, just—er—sleeping. Want to get it right.”

“Right.”

Aziraphale kneels down amongst the blankets, fussing with the arrangement of the soft furnishings. “I wondered,” he says, fluffing a pillow with the same amount of aggression you’d use to extract sensitive information from it, “if it happens again tonight—” He pauses, his hands clenching on the braiding, “if you can’t sleep, or if you do and then—well, I wondered if you might like to be held.”

“Held? Like a prisoner?”

“How would that help?”

“I don’t know, you’re the one suggesting it.”

Aziraphale turns around on his knees to face Crowley. “I meant held like… _held._” Aziraphale holds his arms out as if he’s about to take up position for a dance, and then folds them towards himself.

Like a hug.

Crowley tries not to look startled and, he suspects, fails entirely. “Oh.”

“I have it on the authority of several illustrious writers from the romance oeuvre that it can be very comforting. I don’t see why that should be any different for a celestial being in a human body than a human being in a human body.”

“Right. Makes sense.”

Does it?

_Does it?_

“We don’t have to. I just thought perhaps I should ask now. It doesn’t seem like the sort of decision one would appreciate having to make on the spur of the moment, especially if one is suddenly awoken and… frightened.”

Crowley recoils.

“Oh you needn’t—” Aziraphale sighs. “After what you’ve been through, it would take a miracle not to be affected.”

“I thought that’s what you did to my head. A miracle.”

“Not quite. Didn’t want to overshoot on my first try.”

Aziraphale pats the tapestry beside himself and produces a book from his pocket, before removing his coat and rolling the cuffs of his sleeves up to his elbows.

In response, Crowley takes his own jacket off and hangs it on the corner of the bookshelves. He knows that Aziraphale knows he has arms—has felt them from the inside quite recently, even—but it still makes his skin prickle with unaccustomed attention to be standing there in just a t-shirt, Aziraphale’s gaze roving over them. He toes off his shoes and socks, fingers twitching to take his sunglasses out of the pocket they’ve been in all evening, but he wouldn’t want Aziraphale to think he’s done something to make Crowley feel uncomfortable.

So he acts like he’s not. He gets under one of the blankets and lies down, on his back at first, but he’s not sure what to do with his face when Aziraphale can see so much of it, so he rearranges on his side, back to Aziraphale’s legs, pulling one of the cushions under his head. 

And, like it’s perfectly normal, like they’ve been doing it for centuries, Aziraphale starts to read. The protagonist has been sent away to his uncle’s for bad behaviour, is writing ghastly, overblown love letters to his paramour, berating them for their role in the debacle, and after a couple of pages, it does feel normal, is the thing. 

Experimentally, Crowley inches back until he can feel the solid weight of Aziraphale’s thigh against him. It makes him feel drowsy and alive all at once, softens the edges of the way he usually feels when he settles down to sleep. Something about it, being here, surrounded by things Aziraphale magicked him, brings Aziraphale’s words back:

_Let me care about you._

That’s what he’s doing, isn’t it? Caring. Not saying it. Doing it. And it’s a little clumsy, a little fussy, but that’s what makes it real, makes it feel intrinsically Aziraphale.

Crowley knows Aziraphale likes him, knows it as well as he knows anything; no angel defies Heaven with someone they’ve merely decided, via centuries of attrition, to tolerate. He _suspects_ Aziraphale fancies him, although that one is still clouded with doubt, owing to the number of times Crowley’s given him the chance to act on it and the number of times Aziraphale hasn’t taken them. The rest, though…?

Aziraphale’s voice rises as he gets into acting out a section of dialogue between the hero and a servant who’s rumbled his true feelings, soft inflections of surprise and delight to ape the characters. He’s no doubt being entertaining; Crowley couldn’t repeat a single word because his thoughts are tumbling through the night before—the last thing he remembers is his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder, and he woke, alone, wrapped in blankets on the floor—to the book, the flowers. He pictures Aziraphale collecting each of them, saving them as if they weren’t ephemera, as if there was something about them to which he wanted to cling. All the time they represent, all the encounters, the conversations…playful and hurtful and everything in between.

Crowley thinks about the word _enchanted_, but if he ever knew what it meant, he loses it in thinking too hard and trying to pull it apart.

“The held thing,” he mumbles.

Aziraphale—who’d just paused for a dramatic breath—has to take a second to rally, before he says, “Yes? What about it?”

“What if—”

Crowley shifts on the tapestry. It’s worn and comfy and he worries at the thread, trying to feel in it the weight of all the evenings they’ve spent sitting on it, drinking and talking and making each other laugh. “What if I… wanted that other than when I wake up screaming?”

A moment, in which he suspects neither of them actually breathes, passes.

And then, quietly, Aziraphale says, “Well, that would be—I daresay that could be arranged. _If_ you did.”

“I do. I think. If you—might want..?”

_Me._

Another pause.

Crowley digs his nails into the tapestry.

With a soft murmur, Aziraphale slips down beside him, making almost no sound as he rearranges behind Crowley.

Or at least less sound than the rabbit-like thunking of Crowley’s heart.

Even though he expected it, even though he asked for it, he’s still not quite prepared for the feel of another body settling adjacent to his, and he’s especially not prepared for the weight of Aziraphale’s hand as he places it gingerly on Crowley’s bare arm. His entire being bristles, firing up his nerves, as if bits of him that have been dormant the entire time he’s been on Earth are waking up, as if this is the thing for which they were created.

“I—” Aziraphale says, and the light, jovial politeness of his tone cracks, a little. “I’m afraid I don’t think I can read to you like this.”

“Wasn’t listening anyway.”

Crowley breathes at the darkness of the shop floor beneath them. If he squinted, he’d be able to see himself sprawled there, future he spent decades not quite allowing himself to imagine splintered around his knees.

He doesn’t squint. He closes his eyes, envisaging the weight of Aziraphale’s hand pining him to the core of the Earth. He listens for Aziraphale’s heartbeat to see if it’s marking double time like his is, tries to work out if he’s imagining that’s Aziraphale’s breath against the back of his neck.

An indeterminate amount of time passes, and then:

“Crowley?”

The word is soft, tickles through Crowley’s hair.

He shifts and opens his eyes in answer: _yes, I’m still awake. _

“Might I ask you something?”

Crowley shifts again, turning his head just enough that Aziraphale’s nose brushes his ear. He doesn’t think he’s ever been this close to anyone. “Anything.” 

Aziraphale’s voice is faint as a cobweb and twice as fragile. “What are we doing?”

“What d’you mean?”

“This,” Aziraphale says, fingers ghosting down to Crowley’s elbow and back up again. “What is it, for you?”

Crowley rolls over to see his face. He knows Aziraphale’s features almost as well as he knows anything in any physical realm. He knows where dimples form when he smiles—what kind of smile produces a dimple at all—he knows the tuck in the middle of his chin and where, precisely, his frown lives. His knowledge of Aziraphale’s face is, by anybody’s standard, ancient. But he’s never seen it quite like this before. Not from here. Sure, he’s pushed Aziraphale against walls and shouted at him from the end of his own nose, but there must be a kind of relativity to proximity, that the reason you’re close to someone changes how close you feel, what it means.

And Crowley realises that from here, like this, there isn’t a truth he wouldn’t tell Aziraphale. “Well it’s everything, isn’t it?”

He looks into Aziraphale’s eyes for a hint of reaction, for reassurance that his honesty isn’t going to tear this entire thing apart, that he’s not about to be thrown out and given a century’s worth of cold shoulder.

But Aziraphale is giving absolutely nothing away. He just breathes Crowley’s breath in, then out again, cool air tickling at Crowley’s lip.

And then, very quietly, Aziraphale says, “Crowley? May I kiss you?”

Crowley’s chest feels like it’s collapsing, and it’s a long moment before his mouth manages to form words. “By all means. Yes. Please do.”

He’s expecting Aziraphale to falter, trip over his certainty as it falls away, to hesitate, at least, to ask him to stop time or throw out a question that’ll give him another moment to prepare. He’s expecting Aziraphale to kiss his fingers or his forehead or even the tip of his nose, to be friendly and courteous and maddeningly polite, to stay just shy of what Crowley wants, the way he always has. What he’s not expecting is for Aziraphale’s fingertips to brush his jaw, delicate, like Crowley’s a fragile, tiny thing made of intricate parts barely kept together. And Satan, maybe he is, because surely if he moves, this—_he_—will crumble into pieces. 

Aziraphale’s mouth is soft and tentative on his, and his kiss is a fleeting thing that ends on a smile, as if he’s amused at the way Crowley’s frozen in place by his own thoughts.

Crowley didn’t do it right. He should’ve done this with someone else. _Anyone_ else, just to sort out the mechanics of it, shouldn’t—

Aziraphale thumbs his chin, tilting it up. This time, when their lips fit together, it’s better, still soft, but Aziraphale’s determination is hidden behind it, and it makes Crowley ache like he hasn’t since… all the times he’s ached with _not_ doing this. At the coax of Aziraphale’s lips, Crowley parts his, just enough to taste the warmth of Aziraphale’s mouth. His stomach swoops like he’s stepped off a planet, but as soon as he starts to lean into it, Aziraphale’s breath replaces the pressure and he retreats to the end of Crowley’s nose.

And Crowley expects him to run, or at the very least to say _night-night, then_ and change the subject, as if it never happened.

His entire body braces for it.

But Aziraphale lets out a soft breath that joins the one he left on Crowley’s mouth a moment ago, clings to the front of Crowley’s shirt, pulling it tight across his shoulders. It might be the best thing Crowley has ever felt. He covers Aziraphale’s clenched fingers with his own, watches the bob of Aziraphale’s throat as he swallows.

“Well,” Aziraphale says, jaw working. He glances down between them at their hands, as if he can’t look at Crowley at the same time as feel whatever he’s feeling.

“Indeed.”

Crowley watches him grapple with it, because it’s easier than grappling with it himself, easier than thinking anything other than _God above, Satan below, please let’s do that again. _Having waited so long for it, kissing Aziraphale seems at once very small and absolutely dwarfing, like he’s standing on the edge of the universe and peering back at it, seeing it spinning like a top.

The melodrama in his head is absurd.

Or it would be, he supposes, if they weren’t lying on a tapestry with lovers on it, surrounded by books, a great number of which have, at their heart, a moment just like this.

Aziraphale fixes a fractured smile in place, Crowley suspects in attempt to cover the trembling of his chin. “So,” he says, with a furtive look back up to meet Crowley’s eyes, “I take it we’re… sweethearts, then? Of a sort?”

Crowley gathers Aziraphale’s hand to his mouth. He wants to know everything about Aziraphale’s hands, about his arms, about all of him, settles for peppering his knuckles with kisses, mapping all the little details of where bone meets bone. The word _sweethearts_ ricochets around his head, around his body, bouncing off the parts where what he feels for Aziraphale lives, clawing and ragged and desperate to get out.

“Don’t think there’s anything sweet about my heart, angel,” he says, mumbling the words against Aziraphale’s skin. There’s a flash of cold from his ring, delicious and enticing and grounding all at the same time. “But—if that’s what you want to call it—” He lets his tongue out to just taste it before closing his lips around the band in a kiss, watching Aziraphale’s eyelids flutter, his mouth fall open. “—then… yes. We can be sweethearts.”

“Very good.”

It’s quiet, a rushed whisper, makes Crowley’s stomach shrivel up. He does it again, watching Aziraphale so closely, wondering what he’s seeing, what he’s feeling, what he’s thinking, all of it.

“You should get some rest,” Aziraphale says, shakily. “Shall I read until you fall asleep?”

Crowley kisses where hand turns into wrist, tracing down a little way, trying to find Aziraphale’s pulse with his tongue. “I don’t want to sleep through the first night I spend with you like this.”

A flickering expression, the same one Crowley has seen too many times before that signals conflict inside him, burgeons on Aziraphale’s face. Crowley stops. “What? What is it?”

“When you say things like that I—” Aziraphale’s breath turns rapid and heavy and his gaze is everywhere but Crowley’s face, even though at this distance, avoiding it is more work than not.

“You don’t want me to? You don’t want me to say that?”

Aziraphale frowns so fast it looks like a wince. “It just—”

“What?”

“It—” His breathing is broken and he goes through half a dozen pained expressions before collapsing into something that looks a bit like surrendering. “—it makes it hard not to fall for you.”

A spike of fear shoots through Crowley’s body. “You don’t want to fall for me?”

Aziraphale swallows. “I’m not sure one has much choice in the matter.” He wets the corner of his mouth with the very tip of his tongue and in spite of his words, Crowley longs to chase it with his own. “I am, however, attempting to remain on somewhat of an even keel.”

“Why?”

“We’ve been friends for a very long time.”

Crowley raises an eyebrow. “Wasn’t that long ago you wouldn’t have admitted that.”

“Exactly,” Aziraphale whispers, with earnest force. “Quite so. That’s is precisely why—” He touches Crowley’s chest as if making a point, but his fingers stay, toying with the loose material of Crowley’s shirt, making a little fold in it, and whatever the point was, he loses it.

“Aziraphale?”

“It’s just that—” His gaze flicks up, searches Crowley’s face before scampering away again. He tilts his head as if he’s about to explain something very complicated that he doesn’t expect to Crowley to get. “I find myself thinking of you a certain way and catching myself, then _catching_ myself catching myself and realising I don’t need to do that anymore.” He watches his own fingers pinch the fabric into place, words rushing out of him all at once. “I can think about you any way I like, now, can’t I?” He smoothes out the fold he’s just made before remaking it, pressing the material against Crowley’s breastbone. “I could tell the whole world about this if I wanted to.”

“Could,” Crowley concedes. “Doubt many people would be interested, to be honest.”

“Sergeant Shadwell might be,” Aziraphale says. “Last time he was here, he accused me of being an unscrupulous womaniser.”

A snort bursts out of Crowley before he can stop it.

“What?” Aziraphale says. “I’d have turned my hand to it, should the need have arisen.”

Crowley grumbles light disparagement.

“I’m doing all right with you, aren’t I?”

There’s a note of genuine uncertainty in it, and it fractures something inside Crowley to think of Aziraphale not knowing, after all this time, that Crowley is the one thing he can be certain of. “More than.”

Crowley takes Aziraphale’s hand from where it’s still fussing on his chest, lifts it between them, experimenting with the way their hands can fit together, sliding his fingers down between Aziraphale’s so their knuckles are flush, lifting off again, cataloguing every shift in sensation. He fits their palms together, Aziraphale’s soft and broad next to his, and Crowley runs his thumb down the side of Aziraphale’s hand and brings it to his mouth again. He holds it there, not kissing, just for the connection of it, but after a moment, he can’t resist seeing how one of Aziraphale’s nails feels against his lip.

Smooth and curved and a little cold.

He likes it.

He likes all of it.

He opens his mouth and gives it just the slightest little nip, something like a shiver rippling through him as Aziraphale’s breath hitches.

“I think I would,” Aziraphale whispers, voice tiny and secretive, “if it came to it, you know.”

Crowley looks at him in question.

“Fall for you, that is.” 

Crowley is used to being the one on the line.

So used to it that Aziraphale’s words throw him completely. He can’t think of a single thing to say in reply.

“Maybe I have fallen,” Aziraphale says, frantically glancing up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Is there supposed to be paperwork? Will there be something official? In the post, perhaps? Oh and I threw all those letters away. What if—”

Crowley eases closer, find a place for his knee under one of Aziraphale’s. “Shhh.”

“Yes but what if—”

Crowley skims the corner of Aziraphale’s mouth with his thumb, like he can brush away the words and the doubt and the fear that’s digging in there. “Don’t.”

Aziraphale’s fingers slip out of Crowley’s hand and go back to his shirt, pulling him closer. Crowley goes with it, tucking Aziraphale’s head into the crook of his neck, pulling the blanket up around him, wrapping his arm around his shoulder. He wants to ask if this is right, if the romance writers were correct, if he’s finding it comforting, but he can feel the shaking in Aziraphale’s fingers, the tension in his arm.

It’s clearly not enough. Of all the times Crowley has almost lost him, this is the worst, like he’s slipping away right in front of him.

Crowley scrabbles for something else, something more, instinctively turns his head, mumbles non-words and tiny almost kisses along the shell of Aziraphale’s ear. “You didn’t fall,” he whispers. “You didn’t. You didn’t.”

Aziraphale’s fingers twisting in his shirt makes him feel bolder, and he trails kisses along Aziraphale’s cheek, each one a little more insistent and confident than the last. “You’d feel it,” he says, although there’s more breath than word in it as he reaches the corner of Aziraphale’s mouth. “Here,” Crowley says, touches under his collar and his slightly skew-if bowtie. “Here first, and then everywhere.”

Aziraphale’s lips part right next to his, let out a catch in his throat.

Crowley’s fingers dawdle on Aziraphale’s soft shirt, like reassurance is a thing he can make seep through it. He’s more aware than he’s ever been of anything how close they are, like their heartbeats are calling for each other, trying to break through the barrier of bone and skin. “You didn’t fall. You won’t. I know it.” Crowley presses reassurance in the shape of a kiss to the fragile skin underneath his eye and then to his cheek. “_I’d_ feel it. I would. I’d know, I promise.”

Aziraphale nods, grits his teeth, and how strange it feels, the hardness of it under Crowley’s mouth. He kisses Aziraphale there again, trying to make it soften, cups his face in the palm of his hand and tries to smooth the tension out with his thumb.

Unintentionally it brings their mouths very close together.

Ragged, they breathe over each other’s lips.

In and out.

In and out and very quickly in again.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, and he tugs Crowley’s shirt so hard their noses bump.

“Mnm?”

Aziraphale just breathes at him, like he can’t do anything else, and in it Crowley senses fear and longing so deep it might be his own, echoing back at him. He scuffs the corner of Aziraphale’s mouth with the tip of his thumb, their parted lips brushing. “This?” he says, dragging the word across Aziraphale’s mouth. “You want me to?”

For the most fleeting second, he thinks Aziraphale will say no, but Aziraphale’s fingers twist purposefully in Crowley’s shirt, reply already catching on his lip.

“Crowley,” he says, desperate and hopeful at the same time.

It’s been six thousand years and Crowley has never felt Aziraphale’s voice like this, like it’s part of him.

“Crowley, kiss me.”

And Crowley kisses him, the way he’s thought about doing for centuries, with his hands on Aziraphale’s face and his entire body behind it. He pours everything into it, everything he’s thought and felt and wanted, everything he’s tamped down and tried and failed to keep to himself.

With a cracked exhale, they open up to each other. Their tongues meet in a flash of sensation, calm and agitation rushing together, colliding in the middle of him. It’s so all-encompassing, so startling, Crowley has to draw in a breath to steady himself and it’s cool on the wetness Aziraphale’s mouth left on his lip.

_Can you taste the way I’ve yearned for you? _

_For this?_

Aziraphale answers by pulling Crowley over him, insistent fingers digging into the nape of his neck, tugging on his hair, and Crowley gives him another chance to, pressing harder into his mouth. He tries to separate out the different ways his body is reacting, but it’s all happening way too fast to do anything but feel it.

And he feels it.

He feels it he feels it he feels it.

He feels the urgency of Aziraphale’s kiss and all the things it’s saying in apology and confession, he feels the helpless twist of his fingers, the craving of his body, the hook of his heel against the back of Crowley’s calf. He feels Aziraphale’s mouth slip from his, the scrape of Aziraphale’s teeth on his throat and the responsive curl of his own toes, and it registers very faintly, _oh, this is desire_, _yours and mine and maybe ours together._

It takes him a moment to realise what it reminds him of, and then it hits: it’s like pinging between stars he created, the way each of them clawed for him, begging him to stay and call them home.

* * *

Crowley stalks down the hall, agitation burrowing under his fingernails and every muscle in his back coiled, ready for action that isn’t coming. Or not quite yet, anyway. His mind races through Aziraphale wringing his hands against a backdrop of autumn leaves, flashes of _may you be forgiven_ and _you can’t leave_, before finally it sticks on:

_Ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous._

Crowley should just toss the whole conversation onto the compost heap of hurtful things that have passed between them over the centuries and think no more about it. After all, he still has the Anti-Christ to find and an apocalypse to abort, he can’t get blindsided by… whatever that was.

A break up?

Did they break up?

Is it even possible to break up with someone you were never really with?

He thumps the wall, sting of it echoing up through his wrists and petering out too soon in his arms. Trust Aziraphale to only acknowledge the thing between them in order to throw it in his face. And he knew it was coming, didn’t he? He knew that when it came down to it, Aziraphale would choose Heaven over him.

He knew it.

Of course he did.

So he’s the one being ridiculous, for expecting anything else.

He just needs a plan. That’s all. Maybe he should go back to Hell, poke around some more. Maybe he should enlist Mavis, see if anyone has filed any expenses that might give him a clue. Maybe he should—

He doesn’t know what. He’s out of should.

He slumps against the wall, rests his cheek against the cool of it for a moment.

It feels like Aziraphale.

He breathes at it, not imagining it’s him, but not quite not imagining it, either.

They touched, in the bandstand.

Accidentally.

A nothing-y little collision of fingers.

Inconsequential.

But fleeting as it was, Crowley felt it.

For once, Aziraphale wasn’t calm. He wasn’t certain. His doubt about what he was saying was all over him, spiralling out like vines desperate to attach to something.

And Crowley didn’t give him anything.

Or not the right thing.

Or something.

He pushes off the wall, spins on his heel, enters the plant room.

A rustle of leaves ripples out from him and he stares down a shaking palm. “What?” he shouts, and earth jumps out of the pot and spills all around it.

He paces to the window and huffs at the glass. Beyond it, people are going about their daily whatnot with no idea—literally none whatsoever—that the last seconds of their lives are just ticking away.

He clenches his fists, longing to be one of them. Longing to swap this tumult of feeling, fear and disappointment and loss that hasn’t even happened yet, for literally anything else. He wants to punch the glass but instead he roars “Why are you doing this?” at the ceiling.

He’s not entirely certain what he’d do if God answered, why he thinks there would be a reason, even, when everything he knows about God and the universe is that none of it actually makes sense.

“Senseless,” he mutters. “This is all senseless.”

For want of better things to do, he grabs the plant mister and gives the palms a thorough drenching. A couple of the peace lilies are still trembling, roots tugging at the soil as if they might be able to run away from him. “Oh don’t waste your time being scared of me,” he hisses. “Whole planet’s going to implode and what comes next will make me look like… I don’t know. Like some kind of cartoon granddad.”

They twitch under the spray as he directs it onto them. A couple of the trailers pop out new vines, crawling along the wall, seeking something to anchor themselves with. Crowley’s stomach flips and something inside him flares.

“You see this, God?” Crowley growls, flicking the words to the ceiling. “You see all these things minding their own business? We just want to exist. Can’t you leave us to exist? It’s not too much to ask, is it? I just need more time, I just—why can’t you give me this?”

The silence becomes an answer. 

Crowley sinks to the floor.

He doesn’t cry.

But it’s a very close thing.

* * *

There are so many people on the street outside the bookshop that Crowley almost misses him.

And then when he hears what Aziraphale has to say, he almost wishes that he had.

* * *

All the way home, he grits his teeth, fingers rigid on the steering wheel as he turns it over and over.

He doesn’t get it.

He doesn’t get why Aziraphale won’t listen.

He doesn’t get why Heaven’s iron grip is crushing him and all he does is twist more tightly into it.

He does get it.

He does get it, he thinks.

Because if he’d known, before he fell, that he was about to do it, he probably would’ve done the same thing.

He sits in the car, in the car park, for a long time.

He stares at the windshield.

He thinks of the first time he gave Aziraphale a lift home, how they hovered on the doorstep of the bookshop, taking two hours to say goodbye before Aziraphale invited him in. He thinks of the last time, which might actually be the last time, and he thinks of all the times in-between.

And then he goes inside.

The apocalypse is probably coming.

Hell is _definitely_ coming.

But he doesn’t go to the stars.

He goes back to his plants, and he gives them some fertiliser.

“You’re all going to die,” he says. “Might as well look good while you’re doing it.”

The ficus creaks in a way that sounds almost like a question.

“For the record,” Crowley says, to it, “I’m not staying for you. You can… burning goo for all I care.” He eyes the plants one at a time so they know he means it. “And the same goes for him. I’m not staying for him.”

The kentia palm rustles its leaves.

“He can—”

Crowley stops.

Even though he’s the only one who’ll hear it, he can’t finish the threat. He can’t wish—however unlikely it is to mean anything—Aziraphale into a puddle of burning goo. He can’t gleefully imagine the planet crumbling out from underneath him while Heaven looks on, laughing at his anguish, even if it would be a final _see, I told you so._ He can’t do it.

Standing there with his plant mister, he knows it’s ridiculous to try and change things.

Because hope _is_ ridiculous.

That’s how it survives.

It crawls over the debris of things, finds a home in the crevices of ruins, and it grows. It grows for the sake of it. It grows because there’s nothing else to do.

And Crowley… Crowley gets it.


	7. Waking Up Slow

Dawn peeks underneath the blinds downstairs, shedding light on the first time in six thousand years Crowley has started a new day with someone else next to him.

Right next to him.

Mouth to mouth, in fact.

Crowley’s been to Heaven, bathed in its eternal light and breathed in the scentless air; he wonders why it doesn’t look more like this, a fleeting soft grey wash on tapestry and the smell of someone else all over you. Aziraphale’s lips are velvety and surprisingly proficient, moving over his, as they are, with careful relish. Crowley chases the kiss. He always thought he’d like kissing. He didn’t know he’d like all the other stuff, the way Aziraphale’s nose squashes up to make room for his, the way it’s possible to modulate the intensity of a kiss by nothing more than shared instinct, the way the trace of a thumb down the side of his neck triggers a tug behind where his naval would be if he had a real one.

He _really_ likes that.

After a moment, Aziraphale draws away, leaving him open-mouthed and wanting, and just for a second, Crowley is terrified that the daylight will take this, that as night retreats, this soft, radiant feeling will go with it, that the tingle of his lips—of his entire body—will fade and the way Aziraphale’s looking at him and touching him so tenderly will disappear and never come back. He screws the nearest bit of Aziraphale—his shirt sleeve—up into his palm in case he tries to leave. 

But Aziraphale doesn’t seem to be leaving. He’s tracing the snake etched into Crowley’s skin.

Faintly, as if it happened centuries ago rather than hours, Crowley remembers they’re lying on a tapestry with lovers on, and Aziraphale wants to be his sweetheart. He has no idea how to do that, how to _be_ that. In all the times he thought about this, idly and intently and obsessively, he never really got past the very start. He thought about kissing and wanting kissing and maybe, most terrifyingly, talking about wanting kissing, and now he’s done that, he’s not sure what happens next. Do they go on the sort of dates humans do, to the pictures and the park and nice restaurants? Do they dress up for each other and give each other nicknames and create jokes to wrap around themselves and keep everyone else out? They’ve already done all of that. Over and over and over again.

“I remember when your hair was longer,” Aziraphale murmurs.

“Which time?”

“Any of them.” Aziraphale traces the very tip of the snake’s tail. “All of them, perhaps.”

It’s a divine kind of ticklish, Aziraphale’s touch over the thing which says to all other demons who he is. Crowley catalogues the sensation, files it along with the spark produced by a nip to his lip and the quiet, dull ache of the second after they kiss, when he longs for another and wants to honour the one they just shared by trying to remember every second of it at the same time. So many different, new sensory responses to try and understand. He wonders if Aziraphale feels the same, if he’s tingling and humming as if he never existed for any purpose but to be touched like this, or if being touched by a demon and an angel are inherently different things.

“You know, I lost hours to daydreaming about running my fingers through your hair,” Aziraphale says. “Most distracting.”

Obligingly Crowley nestles into his touch.

“I was relieved when you shortened it,” Aziraphale murmurs. “That is, of course, until presented with the matter of your very diverting neck.”

He trails his fingers down as if in illustration and when he reaches the top of Crowley’s shirt, Crowley catches his hand and kisses his knuckles. It seems ridiculous that a day ago, he couldn’t have done this. Or he could’ve, perhaps, but not without startling Aziraphale out of his chair and potentially upsetting a teapot. How fast things change, he thinks, which again is ridiculous, given how long it’s taken them to get here.

“We should get up,” Aziraphale says, though there’s reluctance in his expression. “Corporeal forms and floorboards don’t really mix.”

Crowley grumbles. One of them could miracle a bed. Could’ve last night, too, but Crowley knows that would feel different; he suspects they both do. They’re not bound by mortal rules, or even mortal desires, really, but that doesn’t mean the implications and associations of things don’t seep in over time.

Slowly, Aziraphale sits up and, just in case this is the only time he ever gets to do this, Crowley follows, nudges into his space and then Aziraphale’s nose with his, asking for a kiss. Aziraphale obliges, covers his mouth in a way that’s soft and warm and just a little teasing. Crowley sinks against Aziraphale’s body, winding his arms around his neck. If anything, it’s surprising how naturally it comes to him to do it, how he doesn’t have to think about it, as if the cells and muscles and sinews that make him up already knew how to do this, long before his brain caught up with the idea that he’d like to.

Drawing away, Aziraphale looks at him for a long moment, fingers stroking over his hair, where it’s short behind his ear.

“What?” Crowley says.

“Nothing. Just—for the longest time, I thought the world would end if we did that.”

“It might’ve,” Crowley says, gesturing to the door. “For all we know, could be carnage down there—sky falling, sea boiling, our former colleagues at each other’s throats, the whole shebang. Gabriel could be about to kick the door in, you don’t know.”

Aziraphale glances at the ceiling, frowning.

“You really think they care?” Crowley says. “You really think they care what you get up to? After everything?” Aziraphale swallows, straightening his collar, and Crowley realises a second too late how that sounded. “Aziraphale—”

“It’s quite alright,” Aziraphale says. “I expect you’re right. What I do doesn’t matter to anyone anymore.”

Crowley props himself on his hand, and as Aziraphale avoids his eyes and puts more space between them, a familiar, jagged thing coils in Crowley’s stomach. “That’s not what I—of course it matters. I just meant—you don’t have to worry, is all.”

Aziraphale gives him a thin smile. “That’s easy for you to say. Not caring about the judgement of the Almighty goes with your territory. Always has, hasn’t it.”

Crowley looks away. He doesn’t want it to sting, but it does. Not like a fresh wound, not deep or especially painful, more like a paper cut over a scar, where the bleeding is a reminder of something that _was_ both deep and painful and took a while to heal. He reads the entire advert for clarinet lessons twice and traces the swirls in the landscape painting over Aziraphale’s shoulder. It takes him back to the Ambassador’s garden, to the cottage with roses around the door, to the argument that made a violet fall from his lapel and end up dry and flat in a book.

Truth be told, he’s never been very good with rejection, which is silly, considering how much practice he’s had at it. There have been big ones and small ones meted out over centuries, sometimes decades between them and other times, no time at all to recover from one before he was onto the next, but he never quite got used to it. He can recognise it when it’s coiled and ready to pounce, though, same way he would anything that’s sprung upon him time and time again.

Aziraphale rolls down his sleeve, fiddling with his cuff, dropping his cufflink when he tries to adjust it. “Blast.”

He retrieves it from the tapestry with a tut and Crowley can feel the night slipping away, just like he feared it would, can feel the tug of the familiar one step forward, fourteen steps back.

“Did you do something to this?” Aziraphale says, huffing as the cufflink slips out of the hole for the third time in a row. “The blasted thing won’t—”

Crowley sniffs. “Nothing to do with me.”

“Maybe your demonic energy has… corrupted it.”

“Demonic energy? My demonic energy is corrupting things, now?”

Aziraphale huffs. “What else would you call it?”

Normally what Crowley would do in a situation like this, where irritation is streaming out of Aziraphale like a gravitational field, is leave.

Or say something he thinks is cutting and _then _leave.

There’s a clunk as Aziraphale drops his cufflink again. “You did something to this, I know you—”

Crowley doesn’t move, and he doesn’t deny it.

And the longer Crowley doesn’t move, the more he realises he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to give in to having an argument about cufflinks that’s not actually about cufflinks. He doesn’t want one of them to storm off. He doesn’t want this to be the last thing they say to each other for a handful of years, until they both pick their way through it and find an excuse to talk again.

Crowley leans in, gestures for Aziraphale’s hand. “Give it here. It’s painful, watching you do that.”

Aziraphale tries again to get the angel wing through the buttonhole, and fails, as Crowley knew he would. With a sigh, he says, “Just—be careful, will you?”

Crowley holds his hand out for the cufflinks.

Aziraphale’s gaze is skittish, reminds Crowley of how it was in the car, so many years ago, when Crowley sat staring at a flask of Holy Water, thoughts it’d take him decades to untangle swirling around him. Just like then, Aziraphale swallows, and hands over what he’s holding, even though it’s clear a bit of him doesn’t want to.

With exaggerated care, Crowley tugs his sleeve down so the holes line up and takes one of the cufflinks, feeling the cool weight of it before feeding the metal through, Aziraphale’s skin warm under his touch and his breath quick and fast on his hair as he bends in closer. He has no idea what he’s doing, only half a thought unfurling, barely formed, based on the way he used to deal with Warlock, the realisation one day that there was no way to prepare him for life as a human, that all there really was to offer him—to offer anyone—was companionship through pain. “It’s ok,” Crowley says.

“What is?”

Crowley snaps the cufflink into place. “I remember,” he says, like it’s nothing, and adjusts the shirt sleeve until it’s perfect.

“You remember? You remember what?”

“Heaven,” Crowley says, softly, and gestures for Aziraphale’s other wrist. “Not from my recent expedition. From before.”

They never really talked about it before last night, _falling, _what that really means, under all the doctrine. In part, Crowley didn’t want to draw attention to the differences between them, to remind Aziraphale they weren’t on the same side, but he also didn’t want to drive him further into fervent adherence to Heaven’s rules out of fear of what lay beyond them by explaining what that was like.

“I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t think you’ve fallen,” Crowley says, staring at the remaining pair of wings glistening between his fingertips. “Or when I said, in my professional demon opinion, that I don’t think you’re going to. But you’re not one of them, either. I don’t think you have been for a very long time. And I don’t think I was, ever. Not really.” Crowley rolls the cufflink through his fingers to orientate it the right way around. “But I remember what it’s like to have all the certainty of Heaven.”

He sets about the task in hand, tugging Aziraphale’s other sleeve down carefully, lining up the holes, making sure it’ll be comfortable around his wrist, giving it way more time and attention than it really needs. “Oh boy, do I remember that, _and_ what it’s like to have it all ripped out from underneath you, like your existence is collateral damage from a magician with a tablecloth trick.”

Aziraphale sneaks a glance at him, just like he has so many times before: as if the mere act of letting his gaze linger too long could lead to disaster. “You felt like that?” he says, and the air between them softens.

Crowley nods.

It’s the most visceral thing he’s ever experienced.

The word _remember_ doesn’t really do it justice.

It’s not a memory, not thoughts recorded in the facsimile of his human synapses. He remembers it with his cells. Like it’s part of him. More than that. Like it’s everything he is.

“First couple of centuries,” Crowley says, sliding the metal through the tiny hole in Aziraphale’s cuff, “I just… bumbled about, really. Lost. Confused. Very confused. A touch angry. The compulsion to obedience, is the thing, isn’t it? That conviction that being asked to do something by Heaven means it must be the right thing to do, because _Heaven’s_ asking it. Being out from under that—” Crowley shakes his head. “The pressure—it’s a lot, deciding what to do about each little thing, weighing its merits in and of itself, never really knowing if it’s the right thing. Or the wrong thing. Or if you’re about to… I don’t know, start some kind of celestial war by breaking a rule no one bothered to tell you about in the first place.”

He fingers the cufflink where it sits snug against Aziraphale’s shirt. In truth, he suspects stepping away from Heaven is much easier to do by accident than on purpose, that losing something and giving it up are two completely different things.

Aziraphale studies Crowley’s fingers. “And you went through all that alone.”

“No I didn’t,” Crowley says. “I had you.”

Aziraphale looks up at him with utmost surprise.

And with a flash, Crowley gets it, something he’s never understood before: Aziraphale has no idea. He has no idea what it was like before the garden, how lonely Crowley was, crawling around Hell, trying to find someone to have a conversation with. He thought Hell would be full of people who questioned—after all, that’s what he was there for—but all he found was the same blind observance, just to a different master. He’d tried to be friends with the other demons, really he had. He’d tried to spark a conversation with Hastur about the nature of reality, but all he’d gotten was a clip board and a comment about how he should fill out some forms. No one could—or would—answer his questions. No one wanted to hear them, to think about them, to look him in the eye as he asked why. Why must we do this. Why are we here? Why why why why why.

Suspicious. It made them suspicious of him.

Just like they were in Heaven.

It wasn’t until the garden, until Aziraphale, that anyone discussed things with him, exposed their own doubts and worries about their own place in it all. Crowley kept their meetings tucked against his chest, and like precious cargo, carried it with him that somewhere out there, Aziraphale might be thinking about the same things he was. Sometimes, he’d be sleeping in a stable or wandering a desert, looking for someone supposed to be a prophet so he could corrupt them, weighing fear and duty against his own will, and he’d have conversations with Aziraphale in his head.

_Is this really the wrong thing to do?_

_Is there even such a thing as the wrong thing?_

_Is it even possible to tell from here which is which or are we just kidding ourselves thinking things can be divided into two piles?_

And some nights he’d just think _Aziraphale Aziraphale Aziraphale. _

A prayer, of sorts.

Hope, of a kind.

Purpose, or something very like it.

Their conversations were the safest Crowley ever felt. And in them, he found his own thoughts. Not Heaven’s leftover doctrines or the propaganda Hell tried to force into his brain: his.

“We can talk about it, if you want,” Crowley says, quietly, thumbing the wings now nestled against the soft material of Aziraphale’s shirt. “Things don’t have to change between us just because… things are changing between us.”

Something flickers across Aziraphale’s face. It’s hopeful and fearful at the same time, and Crowley realises how precarious this all is. “Or,” he says, “if you want to go and wander the desert and figure things out, like I did, just—do that.” He strokes a threadbare patch on Aziraphale’s sleeve. “But let me know if you’re leaving? Otherwise I might assume you’ve been kidnapped by angels and fed to a hell hound. And I’ll… do something stupid. Embarrass myself. You know what I’m like.”

Aziraphale sniffs something that’s half laugh and something else that’s absolutely not. “I don’t want to go away,” he whispers, eyes turning pleading. “I just—”

He doesn’t seem able to locate the word.

Maybe there isn’t one.

Crowley thinks he understands what he means, anyway.

And Crowley would bring down a thousand angels to make it stop for him.

Right now, he probably could. The thing churning in his veins is powerful and angry: a click of his fingers and they’d rain down like birds who died in flight.

But that’s not how it works. Removing from existence those who made Aziraphale feel like this won’t help. He’d still be here with their legacy swirling through his thoughts; Crowley knows that better than anyone.

“You’ll figure it out,” Crowley says. “Maybe not all of it and maybe not all at once, but you will. And… it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Not to me.” Aziraphale meets his eye, so Crowley tries a smile, adds, “Eternal being, here. Lot of time on my hands.”

After a moment, Aziraphale offers him a weak smile. “You must think me very silly,” he says, glancing upwards, “being concerned about—”

“If you lined up all my thoughts about you, right here on the floor, one after the other, do you know where _silly_ would be?” Crowley says, and he needs Aziraphale to listen to him, so he ducks down into his eye line, unavoidable.

Aziraphale shakes his head.

“Croydon.”

Aziraphale laughs.

“Do you know how far away Croydon is?” Crowley says. “Hour and ten minutes in decent traffic—which it literally never is. Ages away, Croydon. Miles. That’s how far away from silly you are.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“No, it’s not. Nothing I say to you is driven by kindness.”

Aziraphale considers him for a moment, before saying, “You must’ve been a very good demon.”

Crowley lifts an eyebrow.

“Effective, I mean. You’re very convincing.”

“Or maybe I’m not,” Crowley says. “Maybe you’re convinced, angel, because you know I’m not capable of kindness, but I _am_ capable of truth.”

Aziraphale goes very still.

Outside, the city appears to be waking up. Horns are honking, people are chattering, there’s the faint cooing of pigeons somewhere outside the window and the distinct waft of warm bread products. Crowley notices it all, because he knows that whatever this day will be, it won’t be quite like any of the others he’s lived before.

“Well,” Aziraphale says, and adjusts the cuffs Crowley fixed for him, then his bowtie. “Maybe one of us should check the world is still there, shops opening as they should, and the like.”

Crowley tilts his head, taking in his expression, the facade of it, and something about everything is clearer than it was before. There’s no need for them to go on human-like dates to understand each other, but Aziraphale wants to be sweethearts, and maybe Crowley can give him that just because he wants it.

“The bakery just opened,” he says. “The one with the croissants you like. I don’t suppose that has anything to do with your insistence we get up?”

The smile Aziraphale flashes him is almost devilish before it turns into a cheeky scowl. “How _dare_ you imply I care about _anything_ but the fate of the world.”

Delightful.

Aziraphale is delightful.

And Crowley is nothing short of delighted about it, apparently.

“Fine, I’ll go,” Crowley says, and staggers to his feet to retrieve his jacket from the corner of the shelf.

Slipping it on again feels like wearing the past. That spike of fear is back again. Not that he thinks they might _actually_ have caused the end of the world, but as if having moved, he’s stepped out of something that can never be returned to.

But he has, of course, and the only thing to do now is keep going with it.

He’s almost to the stairs when Aziraphale says, “Crowley?”

“Hmm?”

“Thank you.”

He waits to see if there’s anything else, but there isn’t.

Outside, the sun is almost oppressively full of autumn cheer. He finds the bakery easily since there’s a line outside the door for bagels, and rather than dispersing them with click of his fingers and cloud of confusion as he usually might, Crowley takes his place and enjoys the wait and the sunshine on his hair.

When Crowley gets back to the shop, Aziraphale is pottering, setting the till up and moving a pile of books from the desk to the stack beside the desk and back again. Crowley drops the paper bag containing almond croissants with little pots of butter and apricot jam down, leans on the edge of the desk with his coffee.

“What are your plans for the day?” Aziraphale says.

“Don’t have any, really. You?”

“Put in a few hours here to try and sell those wretched Thomas Hardy books.” 

“And then?”

Aziraphale looks up at him, and Crowley can’t tell if now, he can tell what Crowley’s really asking, which is the same thing he’s been asking for literal ages. _More. Do you want more of me?_

A pause you could drive several busses through extends itself between them, and Crowley sips at his coffee. It’s fine, if he doesn’t.

It’s fine, if he’s had enough.

It’s fine, if—

“Perhaps we could have dinner?” Aziraphale says. “Later?”

Crowley looks up at him.

“If you’re free, of course,” Aziraphale adds.

If he’s free.

If Crowley’s free.

If Crowley’s free to do the thing he’s wanted to do for approximately forever: have dinner with Aziraphale, knowing they both think it’s the same thing.

“Come to mine?” Crowley says, with a tilt of his head. “I’ll cook.”

Aziraphale looks dubious.

“I _can_ cook. Learnt in Paris. On the off chance it’d come in handy… for something.”

Aziraphale considers him for a moment, and then leans in, and says, “That would be lovely.”

The bell above the door jangles.

“Oh bother,” Aziraphale mutters. “Won’t be a moment,” he calls, before fixing his eyes on Crowley’s. “Shall we say eight?”

“Seven thirty,” Crowley says, pressing his thumb to the corner of Aziraphale’s mouth and glancing a kiss just to the side of it as he slides off the desk. “Don’t be late.”

He leaves while he still has the willpower, taking half a burgeoning idea and the book on floriography with him.

* * *

The sweeping gravel driveway is flanked by rosebushes. The flowers are a little faded but when Crowley gets out of the car, they straighten, and the scent makes up for their ragged appearance. He nods at them and skims the rest of the grounds: the curtains in the gardener’s cottage haven’t moved; the vegetable patch is bursting with pumpkins; the rowan tree is almost doubled over with the weight of its own fruit.

He checks his appearance in the wing mirror, but Crowley never forgets a look. Tight curls and red lips stare back at him, although he looks a little softer, a little happier than the last time he wore this. He strides across the grass, waving to security. The guards aren’t startled to see him; as far as they’re concerned it’s perfectly normal for him to be there, picking his way through the garden to the greenhouse.

The tomato plants have swelled to the size of a moderate jungle and he pushes in and nods in recognition to each of them, letting them know he can tell they’ve grown from fallen seeds, the descendants of the ones he fed with comfrey and a little magic.

“Well you’ve all done… adequately,” he says. “I expect these to be up to the standard set by your ancestors,” he says, moving between the plants to select a handful of the ripest tomatoes. He stows them in his carpet bag and turns to regard the plants from the door. “Keep it up. I’ll know if you don’t.”

On his way to the house, he calls at the edge of the woodland to add a handful of violets to his stash, and then stops at the gardener’s cottage. No one has lived there since Aziraphale—there’s the van from a local landscapers parked in the driveway and a guy in a uniform polo shirt puttering around the far end of the lawn on a ride-on mower—and the roses around the door shift with his attention, like the swaying of a choir.

“Very nice,” he says. He clips a selection of blooms, enough to make a small posy, before heading up to the house itself.

In the kitchen, the radio is blasting and through the glass he glimpses the chef hard at work, mixing icing for the top of a batch of finger buns which sit cooling on a wire rack. Aziraphale used to swoon over them; Crowley couldn’t have timed it better. He knocks on the French windows.

The chef looks over, grins, dusts her hands on her apron, and opens the door. “Oh hiya,” she says. “What a surprise. How the Devil are ya?”

Crowley lifts an eyebrow. “Getting by.”

She beckons him in. “What you doing here?”

“I need a little favour,” Crowley says. “I have a… dinner. And I know you always make more bread than you need.” It’s not him, per se, causing that. She does. He’s just… employing a little opportunism by bringing himself here to take advantage of something which would happen anyway. “And you are, for my money, the best baker in the country.”

The chef flicks the end of a tea towel at him in playful admonishment. “Oh shut it,” she says. “Someone special, is it, this dinner guest?”

Crowley looks down inside his glasses.

He’s not sure special is quite the word.

Crowley runs his fingers along the counter, feeling the edge of it. The last time he was here, things couldn’t have been more different between him and Aziraphale. They’d fought before, sulked for longer, but other arguments could always be resolved by either time or forgiveness. He realised then, ranting at the ceiling, Aziraphale couldn’t forgive him for being a demon, and _he_ couldn’t change, and didn’t want to. Being a demon brought him ingenuity, self-reliance, and taught him about telling right from wrong. The world, Heaven and Hell, they’re all awash with people who think they can tell the difference, but Crowley had seen time and again that the lines are only lines because someone chose to draw them there. Took him a while and the end of the world, but he realised he can draw his own, and they’re as good as anyone’s, and more importantly, perhaps, good enough for Aziraphale.

The chef smiles, possibly mistaking his silence for coyness. “Glad you’ve found someone who likes you for you, anyway,” she says.

Crowley drums his fingers on the counter. The Dowlings have had a new kitchen put in, which is, impossibly, even more tasteless than the last one, but it’s well stocked with both ingredients and top end professional catering equipment, which the chef has made full use of. In addition to the military rows of buns awaiting icing, there are rolls piled like a pyramid on a chopping board, and next to that, a gargantuan granary loaf, and, if Crowley’s not mistaken, there are French sticks in the oven.

“They’ll be another couple of minutes,” she says, following his gaze. “Take one, if you like, and some rolls. Mrs Dowling’s on some kind of low-carb diet but it’s a right pain only making a handful.”

“How fortunate.”

The chef reaches up on top of the cupboard for an old biscuit tin and hands it to Crowley, waving at the rolls. “Knock yourself out,” she says. “They’re wicked with soup, great as a sandwich, even if I say so myself.”

Crowley selects a couple of rolls. They have nuts and seeds on the top and smell rustic and hearty. “Goat’s cheese?” he says. “They go ok with that?”

“Oh, fab,” she says. She draws a strip of icing down one of the remaining buns. “Not been the same without you and the gardener. New tutor is a right knobhead.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Crowley says, although he’s not. Sometimes he thinks about Warlock, late at night when there’s nothing to do but stare at his ceiling, and he wants, just a little bit, for Warlock to remember him with whatever is close enough to fondness to pass muster with a pre-teen. “And the Dowlings?” he says. “They’re still together, or..?”

“They called a ceasefire,” she says. “Came back from some trip to the Middle East all quiet and reflective. They’re not exactly lovebirds but the daily shouting matches have tailed off at least. Take a couple of those ones,” she says, nodding towards the end of the row of iced buns. “They’ll only go off.”

Crowley adds two to his stash, getting icing on his thumb. He licks it off. “Lemon?”

“Gardener used to love ‘em, these. Haven’t made ‘em for ages, but ‘bout lunchtime I just thought you know what’d be nice today? Funny, eh?”

“Indeed.”

“You know, he left the day after you did.” She flicks a glance up. “Strange as anything.”

Crowley’s spine stiffens. He’s not sure he wants to know any more than that, makes a noise of mild disinterest, which must come out as mild interest, because she goes on.

“Found him in the greenhouse,” she says, “talking to the tomatoes. Well, I say talking. Was more like just hovering, pleading with them. He kept saying he didn’t know what to do. What they wanted. How to give them what they needed. I tried to help him but—he just ended up doing that thing people do when you ask if they’re ok and they say they are, but they look like they’re trying not to burst into tears. Next day? Gone. Not a word to anyone.”

Crowley swallows.

“You know what happened to him?”

Crowley juggles various lies before remembering Aziraphale constructed Brother Francis a convenient ongoing family emergency. “I believe he had some issues with his relatives to attend to. Unpleasant bunch. Do gooders who do nothing of the sort.”

He supposes it’s not actually that far from the truth.

“You’re still in touch, then?” the chef says.

“The odd text.”

The chef smiles, in a way that says she can see all the way through him. The oven timer beeps and she quiets it with a deft press. “There we are.” She dons an oven glove and manhandles one of the loaves out of the oven and onto a wooden board. “Will one be enough?”

“Plenty.”

She wafts it with a tea towel to cool it and Crowley looks around the room.

There’s a picture on the wall of Warlock in school uniform. His hair is longer, hangs in his diffident eyes, and his smile is borderline sarcastic. “How’s the boy?” Crowley says.

“Total sociopath. He runs them ragged,” the chef says. “It’s brilliant.”

Crowley laughs.

“He’ll be back soon if you want to stick around. Say hello?”

“No, I—I need to get back,” Crowley says. “But tell him I asked after him?”

“Will do.” She touches the loaf with the tips of her fingers to check the temperature. “Should be alright, that.” She wraps it in brown paper for him and hands it over. “You all set for your dinner, then?”

“Am now.” Crowley lifts the bread in salute. “This is fantastically kind of you.”

“No worries, what are friends for? I hope it works out for ya.”

“Makes two of us,” Crowley says.

“Nice to see you again.”

“You too.”

On his way out, Crowley upgrades the chef’s car from the pile of rust it currently is to the latest model, with all possible upgrades, and a fresh bread air freshener dangling from the mirror.


	8. So Long Without You

Aziraphale knocks on the door on the dot of seven thirty, and Crowley clicks his fingers to open it immediately. They’ve gone centuries without seeing each other in the past, but today, a few scant hours apart has felt… very long indeed. Who knew that knowledge of the way someone’s mouth tastes can mess with your concept of time?

“In here,” Crowley shouts.

He takes a final look around the plant room, at the checked blanket on the floor and the wicker hamper stocked with bread, the little vase of violets and lilac roses in the middle of the spread. He thinks he’s got everything they could possibly want: fancy cheeses; four different kinds of olives; tomatoes from the garden; a box of chocolates from the little shop in Soho; a really very nice wine; and a bag of the kind of crisps Aziraphale always claims are too salty but devours anyway. Crowley turns his attention to the palms. “Now you all behave,” he says, quietly, and they lean towards each other to make a canopy just as Aziraphale comes to a halt in the doorway.

Quite a long halt, as it happens.

He’s changed out of the clothes he was wearing earlier and into his smartest coat and what looks suspiciously like a new bow tie. The tartan is almost indistinguishable from the one he had on—a slightly brighter check—but to someone who spends as much time with him as Crowley does, it screams louder than if he were wearing neon. He’s also wearing the cologne Crowley remarked upon once, a mix of oranges and lavender, and there’s fresh polish on his shoes.

“What’s all this?” his says, his eyes large with surprise.

“It’s a picnic, obviously,” Crowley says. “Thought it was about time we did it properly.”

Aziraphale’s lips work overtime to make a word and still don’t quite achieve it, but he covers it with a smile, surveying the food. “You learned to make guacamole in Paris?”

“Might’ve.” Crowley shrugs. His heart is doing strange things in his chest. He realises in a rush that the reason humans go to restaurants on dates isn’t just so they don’t have to do the cooking: it’s also for the buffer of being observed by others, having social routines to follow, for the air of formality. What he wouldn’t give right now for someone ushering them through the steps of sitting and ordering. His brain feels like fog hanging over a still pond. “We could go out if you’d ra—”

“Oh no, no, not at all,” Aziraphale says, squeezing his hands together where they’re clasped in front of him. “It all looks rather lovely.” He flicks the tails of his coat out and obligingly kneels down, looking up at Crowley until Crowley folds himself onto the ground too.

“Wine?”

“Yes, thank you,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley pours them both a glass, glad to have something to do which feels normal.

Normal for them.

Because obviously for a lot of people, dips and snack food is the epitome of normal. The only reason it’s not for Crowley is picnics have always been accidental, and fully loaded. Now he’s sitting here, the weight of all the picnic’s implications presses him against the cold stone of the floor. There’s no turning back from this, no reverting to a mutually-useful selective blindness about the bits of their relationship which aren’t friendship, no pretending to be anything other than the thing he thinks they’re becoming.

He glances up at the ceiling in a silent not-prayer.

It’s getting dark. Soon enough, the stars will come out above them and provide the perfect accompaniment to the music playing softly from the other room. It might’ve been easier to do this with scurrying waiters to divert them and a menu to peruse instead of conversation, but he can’t think of anywhere that would offer up such a verdant celestial covering. And it’s good to have that, to put him in his place.

“I must say,” Aziraphale says, running his hand over the blanket, “you’ve gone to an awful lot of trouble.”

Crowley grumbles. “I mean I went to Waitrose,” he says, and lifts his glass.

Aziraphale clinks his against it in a way that says he doesn’t believe that for a moment, and takes a sip. Behind it, his smile is both coy and dazzling and Crowley wants to kiss it off his mouth, but he’s not sure if that’s allowed yet, quite what the rules are, if kissing still needs some kind of pre-amble, if he should wait for an invitation. He offers Aziraphale an olive instead.

“Oh, thank you. I’m famished,” Aziraphale says, and pops one into his mouth. “I had quite the afternoon after you left.”

“Really?”

Crowley gestures to the selection of bread, watching as Aziraphale takes a roll, cuts it in half and spreads goats cheese across it before setting it on one of the plates and reaching for a napkin to cover his lap with.

“I barely had time to finish a thought,” Aziraphale says. “A couple came in and had the most extraordinary row over how much a first edition _Middlemarch_ was worth.”

“Humans will argue about anything. Especially with their loved ones.”

“Indeed.” Aziraphale tears a chunk of bread and cheese off and deftly tucks it into his mouth, closing his eyes for a moment to savour it. “I thought they were going to attempt to behead one another with those lovely limited editions of _Bleak House_.”

“Paper cut to the carotid. Oh, very messy,” Crowley says, leaning towards him, gaze caught on a stray crumb in the corner of his mouth.

Aziraphale dabs at his lips with his napkin, dislodging the crumb and Crowley’s fantasy about wiping it away with his thumb at once. “Quite.”

Crowley swirls his wine in his glass. They’ve had thousands of these conversations over the years, the little catch-ups about the minutiae of their day—occasionally interspersed with the more apocalyptic—but it feels like more, this time.

Maybe it’s not possible to have an unloaded picnic, after all.

“Any movement on the Thomas Hardys?” he says.

Aziraphale sighs and reaches for a tomato. “Alas, I think we’re rather stuck with them. Maybe I should try and give them away. What do you think about a special offer?”

Crowley wrinkles his nose. “Buy one get boredom free?”

“Perhaps I’ll put a poster in the window.”

“Cures for insomnia sold here?”

Aziraphale pops the tomato into his mouth. “You know, that is the most perfect tomato I think I’ve ever eaten. You should tell this _Waitrose_ they are _very_ talented.”

Crowley hides his smirk behind his glass, watching as Aziraphale surveys the rest of the spread, fingers inching towards the crisps before deciding on another tomato.

“I don’t mind telling you it’s relief to be off my feet,” he says. “In addition to the arguing couple, there was a woman with a nose piercing and a young man with a dragon tattoo who spoke actual Latin—that was quite a blast from the past, I can tell you—and then a party of Spanish exchange students got off at the wrong bus stop and came in looking for directions to Kew. I had to tell them they were quite off course, but then a lovely bus driver stopped right outside and just happened to be going in that direction.”

“Fancy that.”

Aziraphale lifts an eyebrow, fingers hovering over the cheeses as if he might be able to divine which one is best. “And the lovely lady from the sandwich shop called in to let me know she’d ordered more of the blood orange cans, since she saw you leaving this morning. It was very nice of her of course, but all the interruptions were a tad distracting.” Aziraphale helps himself to a chunk of French stick and tops it with cheddar, savouring every mouthful before dusting breadcrumbs off his hands. “You see,” he says, gaze bouncing up to Crowley’s and then back again to his wine glass. “I was trying to do some research.”

“Research?” Crowley says. “On what?”

“Oh nothing really,” Aziraphale says, with a wave that says it definitely wasn’t nothing. “Just a little reading about—angels and demons.”

“Angels and demons?”

“Yes. About—er—I mean in terms of—that is to say—” Aziraphale clears his throat and after a couple of tries, finally settles on the word, “… relations.”

Crowley looks up. “_Relations_?”

Aziraphale dabs at his mouth with his napkin, even though no food has been bad mannered enough to cling to his skin. “Angel-demon relations. Or relation-_ships_, I should say, perhaps.”

Crowley stills. He should’ve known this was coming, given how shaky Aziraphale was last night, how fragile things felt this morning. Aziraphale turns to books for advice on literally everything. Of course he would do it for this, but the opinions Crowley has chanced upon in the bookshop when idly flicking through volumes with open-mouthed devils dancing on the cover were hardly favourable or, he believes, based on any actual events. “Mmm? You… find anything interesting?”

“A couple of… quite graphic illustrations.”

Crowley snorts and reaches for the bottle. That, too, should’ve been expected. The problem with looking to books for answers on this particular subject, in fact any subject regarding the divine, is that almost all books are written by humans with wild imaginations and little concept of what they’re actually talking about.

Aziraphale clears his throat again, his gaze flitting from the bottle to Crowley. “Might I ask you something?” he says.

“Never known you to hold back on that front.”

“This is a little different,” he says, and holds out his glass. “Personal, you might say.”

Crowley raises his eyebrow. “Go on.”

His mind runs through a dozen different things Aziraphale might ask—if he’s human-like all the way down or if he’s thought about quite how he might like to go about things—as he pours the wine.

He has some answers. Or to be more exact, some vague ideas that might turn into answers if he allows himself to think about them properly. The thing about spending centuries obsessing about kissing someone is that getting to the kissing, and the state of not yet kissing, is the entire focus of the brain’s efforts on the matter. The brain doesn’t bother with the _and then what_ part, not wanting to get its hopes up. Self-preservation, undoubtedly. But also a bit of a design flaw, now he thinks about it, because then everything that comes after that first glorious kiss has to be decided in a rush.

Aziraphale shifts on the blanket, radiating anxiety.

“Anything,” Crowley says. “Seriously, I don’t mind.”

Aziraphale fiddles with his glass before finding his resolve. “It’s just—er—I wondered—thought I might ask—what might be good to know is—” He huffs before drawing himself up to his full height, looks Crowley squarely in the eye. “To be honest I wondered whether or not you’d… done this before?”

“Poured wine?” Crowley says, raising the glass he’s just filled. “Once or twice.”

“I meant more—” Aziraphale waves at the picnic blanket.

Or not at the blanket, actually.

All of it.

At the picnic and them and at the conversation; perhaps at everything which led them here and everything that exists between them.

“Oh,” he says.

The word just sits there, rotating like it’s been dropped onto a lazy Susan, the question dragging somewhere behind it on a delay.

Crowley takes a swig of his wine.

He was primed to talk about the present. He was prepared, maybe, to talk about the future. He wasn’t really expecting to have to talk about the past.

His past.

The bits Aziraphale doesn’t know about. He should have prepared for this like he did for his old presentations to management with note cards and PowerPoints so he wouldn’t be thrown by anything unexpected. He looks at Aziraphale. His expression is part encouragement and part hope and part worry, and honestly Crowley would rather be explaining why he failed at something to Beelzebub’s blank stare.

Aziraphale’s encouraging smile falters and Crowley decides his only course of action is, alarmingly, the truth.

“Who would I have done this with?” he says.

“I don’t know—a demon, perhaps?”

“You know how they say the last thing you want is a wasp at a picnic?” Crowley says. “Well it’s categorically not true. Last thing you want at a picnic is a demon. They’d be… standing up between the sandwiches to recount the _deeds of the day, _talking about how they’ve set something or other in motion by persuading a minor cabinet minister to have it off with his secretary. All business, most demons. Deeply, _deeply_ tedious. If I woke up and found another demon at the end of my nose, I’d beg God to pop the Earth like a balloon while I was still standing on it.”

Aziraphale muses on it for a moment, running the tip of one of his fingers around the rim of his wineglass. “And there was never, say, a human who took your fancy?”

“And how would that have gone?” Crowley says. “Say I meet someone. That’s easy enough. But then what? I lie to them about being a demon? Invent a reason I don’t have any family or regular friends to go to the pub with? Make up some job that takes me off around the world at a moment’s notice doing things I can’t ever talk about?” He rests his glass against his knee. “And fine, say I do all that, _and_ I find a way to pretend to be human _endlessly_ without giving myself away. We find a nice little house in the suburbs, and we… barbecue things and have people over to eat it, I don’t know what humans do these days.” He meets Aziraphale’s eye. “It’s still unavoidable, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Time. It’d come for them. _Death_ would come for them. Best case scenario, he shows up, greets me like an old friend, and my significant other makes a quick exit and a mightily pissed off corpse.”

Aziraphale’s glass halts halfway to his mouth. “Sorry, that’s the _best_ case scenario?”

“Well yeah. What’s the alternative?” Crowley shrugs. “We spend a life together and everything’s fine and dandy until they get sick with one of those diseases that eats away at who they are as a person as well as their body? I can’t heal them. So I just have to watch. I have to watch them suffer and slip away while they’re still in my arms. And right before they die, I take their hand, do I? And I look into their eyes and tell them it’s breaking my heart—but don’t worry, I’ll be along to Heaven soon and we’ll be together again. And then what? They wait for me? They wait for me for eternity? What happens when they get bored of waiting and ask one of the angels where I am? They’re not going to lie for me. Maybe they look me up. _Oh he’s a demon, didn’t you know?_”

Aziraphale considers him for a long moment. “You thought about all that?”

“Well—had to, didn’t I? To decide whether or not I wanted to do it.”

Aziraphale frowns, as if trying to put the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together when none of them fit. In fact, it’s more like he’s just realised the remaining pieces have been substituted in from another puzzle entirely and even if they _did_ fit, they wouldn’t make the picture he thought they would. “You could’ve had… shorter encounters?” he says. “It needn’t have been a lifetime of devotion?”

Crowley looks away from Aziraphale’s gaze. “Didn’t want to take the chance I’d get attached.”

He’s made it sound very simple.

It wasn’t. Some nights he’d think damn it all, why doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he go to a bar and say hello to a few people and see what happens? But every time he thought about it, he’d remember how often he wakes up screaming for people he didn’t even know.

He takes another swig of his wine.

The room’s gone very quiet, all of a sudden, and it takes him a moment to realise that the record he set playing has come to the end of side one.

Crowley leaps to his feet. He crosses the room to the hallway, even though a click of his fingers would have music spilling out of the speakers, wanting to get away from his thoughts. In the lounge, the album he selected has stopped spinning, the needle fruitlessly hanging in want of more notes to play. He picks it up gingerly and sets it back in its cradle, plucking the album from the turntable and spinning it around between the tips of his fingers, blowing dust off the grooves.

“Are you not going to ask me the same thing?” Aziraphale calls.

“Asking,” Crowley mutters, “would presume I don’t already know the answer.”

It used to filter down to him: demons from purchasing and Hell Hound Husbandry would pass his office, congratulating him for seducing someone or other Crowley had only the faintest memory of from the assignment paperwork. He’d protest, _just a rumour, of course I didn’t_, but naturally that just made everyone more certain he’d done whatever it was.

Whoever it was.

He sets the record down again, placing the needle at precisely the right spot. The crackles that emit from it are momentarily reassuring, and in them he hears all the nights he spent alone here, cursing the ceiling and wishing for an excuse to pop over to the bookshop.

“I’ve always liked this song,” Aziraphale says.

“I know.”

Crowley catalogued it, added it to his library of likes and dislikes, not for any grand plan or purpose, but because he couldn’t _not_ do it. He couldn’t know something about Aziraphale and not treat it as important. He sighs at the recalcitrant concrete wall. It’s a wonder he ever got anything done, with his head so full of Aziraphale.

He spins on his heel and heads back to where Aziraphale is making short work of an iced bun.

“I also know all about the things you got up to in my name,” Crowley says, and tries to make it sound casual.

He never mentioned to Aziraphale that the manner with which they approached temptations was substantially different. Crowley didn’t rely on seduction or flirtation or even being charming. The tools of his trade were cunning, persuasion, and trickery, knowing just more about things than his target did, just enough to cause havoc or lay a trap or make something sound eminently reasonable. It amused him, a little, that Aziraphale thought Crowley would go to all the effort of seducing someone to get what he wanted, and it wasn’t lost on him that left to his own devices, Aziraphale went straight for methods based in pleasure and love rather than deception and mischief.

“Really?”

Crowley nods. At the time he thought well, if Aziraphale was going to take his temptations, the least Crowley could do was let him use them to release him from the burden of all his holiness and have a little fun. He liked it, he supposes, the thought that being him—being Crowley—made Aziraphale feel free to pursue the things he never would have as himself.

It wasn’t until the Ambassador’s garden, until Aziraphale mistook Crowley’s genuine romantic intentions for a trick, that Crowley realised there was anything to lose by letting Aziraphale’s impression of him run on unchecked.

Crowley pauses next to a palm, running his fingers along its leaves to check it’s investing enough effort in staying hydrated.

“You know,” Aziraphale says, “back in Heaven, I was praised quite often for piety that was yours rather than mine.”

Crowley looks over at him. “I just wanted to do a good job so you wouldn’t be found out.”

He wishes that were the truth. He wishes that he hadn’t enjoyed it, the miracles, the way people looked at him when he blessed them, that he hadn’t returned from all those missions with a craving that would never be sated, that it didn’t worm its way into his brain that one day God might _feel_ those deeds and realise She’d made a mistake.

And he wonders: if he liked it, playing at being good, and Aziraphale liked playing evil, what does that mean?

He stares at the palm, tracing each frond all the way from the tip back down to where its stem disappears beneath the soil, imagining the sprawling roots and all their feathery ends. Above and below. All connected. The same system, leaves only flourishing in the light because the roots were happy in the gloom.

“Are you quite alright, my dear?”

It’s only when Aziraphale gets to his feet and Judy Garland starts another song that Crowley realises how long he’s been standing there.

“Just… thinking,” he says, with a wave, but it’s not enough to halt Aziraphale’s progress across the floor.

He reaches forward, and from behind Crowley’s ear, he pretends to have magicked a coin from thin air. “Penny for them?”

Crowley darts a glance at it. “That’s not a penny,” he says, “it’s a 50p piece. I’ve stuck enough of them down outside Woolworths to know.”

“Well then you’d better make it a good one, hadn’t you,” Aziraphale says, taking Crowley’s hand, lifting it between them, and placing the coin on Crowley’s palm, before gently folding his fingers over it. “It appears I’ve been grievously overcharged for it.”

The metal’s cool against his skin, and something loosens inside Crowley, but he still finds himself saying, “It’s nothing.”

Aziraphale’s face softens, and when he speaks, his voice matches it. “I doubt that. In six thousand years I’ve never known you have a thought that was nothing.”

He squeezes Crowley’s hand, tucking the coin tighter into his palm, running his thumb over Crowley’s and down, rubbing gently where his wrist disappears beneath his sleeve.

Crowley swallows, as if he can somehow ingest the sensation, the trickle of it, which is firing all the way to his spine; the central nervous system really is a marvellously all-compassing thing. He looks up at the sky.

Beyond the palms, the stars poke out between the clouds.

When he started building up there, there were no guidelines. Heaven of old was not like Heaven today, with its pamphlets and its rigid way of doing things. Possibility and uncertainty were allowed, then. Was it possible to build a binary or would they spin together and destroy each other? No one knew until he tried it. Wasn’t like God was going to tell them. She just left them to figure it out.

Why is he thinking about that now? He and Aziraphale—they’re not stars. They’re not giant balls of gas hurtling through space. He’s not sure quite what they are, but it’s not that.

The inside of his wrist is still tingling with the trace of Aziraphale’s touch, like the vapour trail of a plane in a summertime sky. He’s never been that aware of the inside of his wrist before. He wonders how the same thing would feel in other places he’s neglected to devote the proper attention to, like the arch of his foot and the back of his knees.

Inside of his elbow.

Both sides of his elbow.

Everywhere, in quick succession, so he can barely keep up.

He meets Aziraphale’s gaze, and Aziraphale touches his chin. “One day,” Aziraphale says. “You’ll tell me one day, won’t you.”

Crowley offers him a slow blink and Aziraphale leans in and kisses him, so very soft and deliberate all at the same time. It’s a tiny thing compared to the vast, sprawling universe above them, but the way Aziraphale’s lip nudges his makes everything else feel insignificant. Crowley draws him in with a handful of his coat, trying to say with his whole body how glad he is that they’re doing this, that he doesn’t know what it is or what will happen, and he doesn’t care so long as they’re together.

It’s easier than it should be to let the world slip away until there’s nothing left but the warmth of Aziraphale’s mouth on his. He pulls Aziraphale closer, works the fingers he’s not clutching the coin with into Aziraphale’s hair, chasing the feeling he had last night that blotted out doubt and quieted his mind.

But his mind won’t be quieted this time, curiosity building until Crowley can’t handle it anymore. “How does it feel,” he murmurs, each word a brush against Aziraphale’s mouth, “when I touch you?”

“Crowley—”

“Please tell me.”

His voice is more broken than he thought it would be. He didn’t know this was so important to him until he asked it, and now the words are out, it feels like his entire existence rests on the answer.

Aziraphale looks at him, breath coming out shallow and fast against Crowley’s mouth, like he can feel it, the infinite weight of the question. “It feels lovely,” he says, thumbing Crowley’s jaw.

“I meant—literally.” He runs his fingertips down Aziraphale’s neck. “Literally how does it feel when I touch you?”

Aziraphale’s eyelids flicker closed as Crowley’s fingers ghost over his collar and down the front of his waistcoat, and he swallows. “It feels… warm. Very warm. And—a little wicked.”

“Wicked?”

“Like I’m giving in to something I shouldn’t.” He opens his eyes and meets Crowley’s curiosity with such unabashed honesty, it almost knocks Crowley off his feet. “I like it,” he whispers. “I like it a great deal.”

Crowley opens his mouth to say something, but there aren’t any words there, and a second later, Aziraphale’s mouth is on his, tongue searching for Crowley’s with something approaching desperation. So he gives in to it, he lets the desperation happen, without trying to calm or control it, finds it flourishes between them, makes him think things he’s never thought before about peeling Aziraphale’s shirt from his shoulders and dropping to his knees.

At the thought, he goes giddy, staggers back into the planter. His arse hits the hard edge and for a second he both hates and thanks his past self for making them so sturdy. And then there’s nothing in his head but Aziraphale: Aziraphale’s hands on his face and his fingers sweeping under his ears, his frantic breath on Crowley’s skin, the noises that he’s making spilling out of the side of Crowley’s mouth.

It flits through his head that just as Crowley longed to be recognised by God, maybe Aziraphale was dancing with Satan, seeing how far he could go, a bit of him, perhaps, longing to be pulled down and the rest of him battling the impulse. He’s always known it was harder for Aziraphale than for him. After all, it’s easier to accept falling in love with an angel than a demon. Anyone asks why you did it, you can say, _well he’s an angel, isn’t he? He heals people and radiates goodness and asked me to bring him more than one spider plant because he doesn’t like the thought of them being lonely. _Feel yourself falling in love with a demon, you’ve got to explain it, go through a process of_ what? A demon? I would never. No one _should_ ever. Well he’s not that bad, actually. For a demon he’s really very lovely. He has a hobby and brings me chocolates once a century. _And there’s no getting away from it, from everything Crowley is. All Aziraphale ever had to do to find a reminder was look into his eyes.

Crowley catches Aziraphale’s hand where it’s cradling his jaw, traces the pathways of his bones and the winding green veins down his arms, marvelling at the tingling of his own response all along the pathway of his own nerves, feeling their connection everywhere from his fingertips to his toes. He takes Aziraphale by the hips and pulls him closer.

There’s a soft whoosh and thud, and Aziraphale’s good coat is on the floor.

He’s fussed over that coat for centuries, but before Crowley can even have a whole thought about why he didn’t magic himself a hanger for it, Aziraphale shifts between his knees. All at once everything is more. Aziraphale is hard, right next to where he is, too, and his mouth finds Crowley’s neck. He sucks a kiss there, teeth swiftly following, scraping Crowley’s skin.

Crowley makes a noise he’s not sure he’s made in all his time on Earth. He’s pinging between stars again—or not between them so much as leaping from one, not knowing where he’ll land, and he pictures Aziraphale with him, hand in his, both of them laughing at the sensation of falling.

The weight of Aziraphale’s body pushes him back until he’s sitting on the planter more than leaning on it, and his hands drop to Crowley’s thighs, running up them, squeezing at his arse with a groan. He kisses Crowley again, all tongue and hot breath and teeth, before slipping from his mouth and exploring further down his neck, towards the opening of his shirt.

Crowley has watched humans do this, watched giggles tumble out of their mouths and into the other person’s hair, watched them fumble for something to hold onto and their eyes disappear behind a mask that said the world could end and they wouldn’t notice, let alone care. He spent night after night touching his own neck, trying to create something that would come close to the feeling they appeared to be experiencing, came to the conclusion there must be something missing from him, a loose connection or some dodgy wiring that meant his neck didn’t work the same way as theirs.

What was missing, of course, was the person currently mouthing at his shoulder, rucking up the soft fabric of his shirt, searching for the hem. When he finds it, his hands slip underneath, thumbs pressing into his sides, palms roaming. Crowley gasps at the sensation of fingers on skin no one has ever touched before, the way it seems to startle his entire body.

“Too much?”

Crowley nods. “Don’t you dare stop, though.”

Aziraphale doesn’t, and the more he touches, the more Crowley feels like he’s flying. He scrabbles for the solidness of Aziraphale’s shoulder and clings on, aware of the guilelessness of himself and that Aziraphale seems to know exactly what he’s doing. More than anything, he wants to feel Aziraphale’s chest against his, to map the way the muscles of his back move as he does so, but the only way he can think to express it is to scratch at the soft fabric of his shirt.

Aziraphale must get it—or maybe it’s just the logical next step—because he reaches for his bowtie and undoes it with one hand, the other making short work of his buttons.

Crowley tugs his own shirt over his head and waits for him to come back, trying not to stare at Aziraphale’s throat, his collarbones, the fuzz on his chest as each new inch is revealed. God—Satan—he wants to spend the rest of eternity learning how every millimetre of him feels against every single part of himself. He wants to know what that hair feels like under his ear at noon on a Tuesday and if it’s different to Saturday night, to pour wine over the curve of his stomach and lap it off again, to fit his mouth all the ways it is possible to fit over his nipples and then invent some new ones.

“Beautiful,” Aziraphale says, and for a second Crowley thinks he’s talking about himself, until he realises Aziraphale is staring at him as if he’s having similar thoughts about inhaling Crowley’s freckles.

Crowley hooks a foot behind his leg and tugs him back in, and it’s better than he imagined it, the way Aziraphale’s chest prickles against his. His flesh goose bumps as Aziraphale’s hands sweep up his arms to take his face in his hands, and Aziraphale kisses him soundly before kissing a path across his cheek.

“I—er—what do I do?”

Aziraphale’s mouth is close to his ear, and it’s not words so much as breath which falls against it. “You don’t need to do anything, my love. Just tell me what you want to feel.”

“What?”

“I can give you almost anything.” Aziraphale kisses his neck, his chest, makes his way down, lips brushing, tongue just flickering out to press kisses to his skin. “Ecstasy, euphoria, bliss—” His lips chase Crowley’s stomach as he inhales sharply at the thought. “I intend to give you all of them eventually but we need to start somewhere.”

His mouth fastens on the front of Crowley’s jeans.

“Angel—” Crowley’s head falls back and the sight of the stars conversely brings him back to Earth. “I don’t think—” He screws his eyes closed. “I don’t think you can. Not for me.”

Aziraphale pauses, his fingers halfway through undoing the buttons on Crowley’s jeans, brushing against the ache beneath them.

Crowley catches his hand and brings it up to kiss his knuckles. “I don’t think I can feel any of that. I haven’t, not since—” He doesn’t want to admit it, the hole in his ability to feel things, but he also doesn’t want Aziraphale to feel like he’s failed, that he’s doing something wrong. “—not since I was cast out.”

“You said you hadn’t done this before.”

“I haven’t. I wasn’t lying.”

“Then how on Earth can you possibly know?” He smiles in that sly way he used to in the bookshop in the midst of a debate when he knew he’d let Crowley walk himself into a cul-de-sac argument. “Now, what would you like?”

Crowley breathes in heavily, then out utterly raggedly.

He wants to feel love. For Aziraphale to breathe it into him the way Crowley used to breathe it into stars.

“Anything,” he says. “You choose.”

Aziraphale smiles, nods, lowers his mouth to where it was and makes his way across the front of Crowley’s jeans.

Crowley closes his eyes, digs his fingers into the soil, the edges of the coin Aziraphale gave him for his thoughts still harsh on the palm of his hand, and lets Aziraphale’s feeling wash over him in wave after wave after wave.

* * *

“You miracle the best cushions,” Crowley says, adjusting his head on one with tassels the exact same shade as the roses, “has anyone ever told you that?”

Aziraphale looks up from Crowley’s shoulder with an expression that says _of course I do_ and Crowley can’t think of anything to say so he kisses his ruffled fringe and holds him tighter for a second, until the unbearably sweet feeling in his chest subsides.

The picnic blanket is neither the warmest nor the most comfortable thing, but moving seems unfathomable. He lifts Aziraphale’s hand from where it was lying on his chest, and lines their fingers up. He finds it very pleasing they have five each. The kind of pleasing he could get lost in thinking about. He lets his mind wander for a moment just to see where it will go, and it dawdles on the image of Aziraphale on his knees with his mouth open against Crowley’s hip, the flush of his face and the weight of his panting and the way it was the tug of Crowley’s fingers in his hair which seemed to send him over the edge.

Crowley wants to see that again and again and wonders if it’ll always seem surprising. He traces the sides of Aziraphale’s thumb with his, vaguely aware that Aziraphale’s watching him.

“Do I need to find another coin?” Aziraphale says.

Crowley mumbles a kiss to the top of his head. “You first,” he says, because he has no idea what they just did, let alone what Aziraphale thinks about it.

“I was just thinking I’m glad the world didn’t end.”

“Me too, especially on an airfield,” Crowley says. “I mean come on, we couldn’t have been somewhere more aesthetically appealing for the end of everything?”

Aziraphale shifts, so his chin is on Crowley’s sternum. “I rather meant just now.”

Crowley frowns at him in question.

“At least one volume I found this afternoon suggested that it might, if we—you know.”

Crowley makes a face. “And you still went ahead and—”

“The balance of probability suggested that it was quite unlikely,” Aziraphale says, primly. “Although a definitive consensus on the matter would have saved me some pacing.”

A slow smile creeps across Crowley’s face. He’s always liked Aziraphale’s ability to be reckless when it suits him, to throw caution to all the winds, and swan dive into uncertainty.

He _really _likes that Aziraphale would do it for him.

“Have you really never done this before?” Aziraphale murmurs, tracing a pattern on his chest like he’s making a star chart from it.

Crowley shakes his head.

“You are full of surprises.” Aziraphale’s gaze comes back and he peers at him so close, Crowley can see himself reflected in his eyes. “Is there anything else I don’t know about you?”

Crowley flicks through his memories, although it’s hardly fair to expect him to remember everything he’s told Aziraphale about himself in six thousand years at a moment like this, when his corporeal form feels like it’s waking up from a centuries-long sleep. “In 1973,” he says, “I entered a disco dancing competition. Butlin’s Bognor Regis. I won because all the other contestants got stuck in traffic.”

“That is not in the least bit surprising,” Aziraphale says, dropping his lips to Crowley’s shoulder in a kiss.

“It was legitimate traffic,” Crowley grumbles. “I had nothing to do with it.”

“If you say so.”

Crowley cradles the back of his head as Aziraphale murmurs kisses across his chest, feeling the mess of hair against his palm. He never thought about this, about how Aziraphale would look in a moment like this one, and vaguely he wonders what his human lovers thought to see him like this, all vestiges of his fussiness stripped away, if it felt different for them than it does for him.

“Maybe I can write one,” Crowley says, toying with a stray curl. “A book on demon-angel _relations_, that is.”

“You want to write a book?”

“I used to do it for Warlock all the time.”

“As I recall,” Aziraphale says, “you used to pick and choose what to tell him to suit your own purposes.”

“What do you think all the other books are?”

Looking up, Aziraphale frowns.

“You said it yourself, about Thomas Hardy. He wrote all that misery—was it what people wanted? Did it make them feel better about their own? Or… did it make him feel better about his to bring people down to his level? Travel guide to Devon,” Crowley says, gesticulating like he’s still holding it, “what was that about, other than writing down what harbours are boring to exact some kind of revenge on them?”

He thinks about the book on floriography that’s currently hidden in his study. Maybe the whole thing started with one person who wanted to send a message to say _look, I like you_, but couldn’t face doing it in person so invented a whole social construct to cover it.

“And bibles?” Aziraphale says. “Whose purpose do they suit?”

“Everybody’s,” Crowley says. “Heaven and Hell’s _and_ humanity’s. Tell everyone things can be divided into good and evil, nice and nasty—keeps everyone busy, doesn’t it, wondering which one they are. Constant reassessment against some ever-changing checklist keeps people from just… doing what they want.”

Aziraphale wets his lip. “You don’t think it’s true, then, that some things—some beings—are good and others not?”

“I think we all just… are. We do what we do and that’s it.” 

“Easy for you to say,” Aziraphale says. “_You_ built galaxies. I just did what I was told. Guarded things. And poorly at that.”

“That’s not true.” Crowley watches Aziraphale’s cheek dimple, uncertainly, and tilts his head towards him. “Did you not hear what I said about the cushions?”

Aziraphale’s concerned expression turns into a chuckle, and in it, just for a second, Crowley understands the purpose of the universe. It’s long strange days that bring to the surface things which have always been there, and ones where time alters itself to draw attention to the lack of someone. It’s great, wafting spans of time over in the blink of an eye and tiny little moments that feel bigger than everything.

“Kiss me,” he says, and Aziraphale smiles, moving over him to oblige.

“Whenever you like,” he murmurs, “for the rest of days.”


	9. It's Yourself

Soho is the kind of damp and drizzly which welds fallen leaves to Crowley’s shoes, and around him, people are scurrying to post-work drinks and to meet up with eager lovers. The bookshop is closed by the time Crowley gets there, but the lights are still on out the back. He takes a moment to think about all the times he drove past and looked for those lights, all the times he came here on some vague pretence he half-hoped Aziraphale would see straight through, all the times those lights on out the back made his heart trip like the rest of him had missed a step. But he doesn’t have to pretend there’s a reason to be here other than wanting to be anymore. He pushes the door open, calling, “Only me,” as he saunters through the stacks.

“Up here,” Aziraphale shouts, from somewhere on the balcony. “Won’t be a mo.”

Crowley collapses onto the sofa, rolling his neck and working the knots out of it with his fingers. There’s a dent in the sofa arm that fits his head perfectly and he groans as his body relaxes for the first time in days, closing his eyes and listening to Aziraphale humming and shelving things above.

There are so many memories here, from the first time he came by to see what on Earth Aziraphale had gotten himself into deciding to run a bookshop, through late, drunken nights and bleary-eyed mornings, to confessions he chooses to think will always be embedded into the tapestry currently making uncomfortable shapes underneath his shoulder blades. There’s even last week, when he found Aziraphale with the light on his hair just so and couldn’t resist him, ended up grinding against the curve of his bottom as he gripped onto the shelves right in front of _Middlemarch_.

He’s almost disappeared into the thought when Aziraphale’s footsteps tap on the stairs.

“Long day, darling?” he says.

“Nnmmph.”

“Where _do_ you keep disappearing to?”

“Nowhere special.”

Aziraphale glances over with a fond displeasure, takes off his coat and tugs the front of his waistcoat down. “Oh, some clandestine demonic activity, is it.”

“Naturally,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale lifts Crowley’s feet and sits down where they were, tugging off his shoes and placing them in his lap.

“Heal my feet? Just a little?” Crowley says, but Aziraphale is already pressing into the sorest spots with his thumbs.

Crowley sighs into it.

There was a point in time, in the not too distant past, even, that Aziraphale calling him demonic would’ve stung, but it doesn’t weigh on him like it used to. The world, Heaven and Hell, they’re all awash with people who think they can tell right from wrong, but Crowley has seen time and again that the lines are only lines because someone chose to draw them there. He can draw his own, and they’re as good as anyone’s.

“Are you too tired to go out for supper?” Aziraphale says. “If you are, it’s not a problem, I can have something delivered. Or you can. I’m afraid the workings of that app you showed me are quite beyond me.”

“Working a _mobile phone_ is quite beyond you.”

“That’s not true. I answered that call on yours quite successfully the other day.”

“You hung up on them.”

“Exactly. Why would you want to speak to somebody about a car accident you were in, anyway? Even if you had been in one, which you haven’t. It was just insensitive. And confusing.”

It’s a fair point, and one Crowley would agree with, had he not invented those calls.

Aziraphale applies more pressure and Crowley groans. “Oh there, just there.”

Soothing cool radiates from Aziraphale’s hands, dissolving the tension and pain as it meets it, working its way up his legs. Crowley’s not quite used to it yet, all the different ways Aziraphale can make him feel. Sometimes they both stay awake at night, and in the soft light of the bookshop, Aziraphale will trace Crowley’s eyebrows or thumb at his lip, follow the lines of his throat with the very tips of his fingers or just lift the hem of his jeans to touch the fine skin at his ankle. Sometimes it’s soothing and sometimes it’s the exact opposite, and Crowley still doesn’t understand quite how that works.

He likes it, though. He likes it all. He didn’t know how much he needed to be looked at, needed to be touched as tenderly as it’s possible to touch someone. But he does. He needs to be close, to be wrapped up in time spent only in being with each other and nothing else. He needs the tiny kisses and the sweeping ones, the ones where their noses get in the way of each other, the ones gently placed under his ear and the back of his neck and at the corner of his open, wanting mouth.

“You know, technically,” Aziraphale says, “today is our anniversary.”

“Oh, is it?” Crowley says, because _obviously,_ demons don’t keep track of that sort of thing.

Aziraphale murmurs and presses the back of Crowley’s heel, working tiny circles which make Crowley squirm. “What do you suppose you get someone to celebrate their six thousand and first anniversary?”

“We’re counting from there, are we?”

“Are you disagreeing with my timeline?”

Crowley shrugs. It does funny things to his chest that Aziraphale is counting from there, that to him, too, this began on a wall and not in Crowley’s kitchen. He murmurs in thought. “Six thousand and one. It’s not paper, it’s not diamonds… wait, it’s coming back to me. Is it… is it sushi?”

“You know that does ring a bell.”

Crowley swings his feet down and retrieves his shoes. “Come on.”

“I thought you were tired?”

“I’m tired, not _too tired_ to take you out to your favourite restaurant on our anniversary.” He holds out his hand.

“Well if you insist,” Aziraphale says, letting Crowley pull him to his feet, “give me ten minutes and I’ll be fresh as a daisy.”

They’re led to a table for two in the window, which miraculously became free just as they arrived, the lantern decorations on the street outside rendered colourful blobs by the fog on the window. Everyone here refers to Crowley as ‘Mr Aziraphale’s friend’, which makes him feel simultaneously like a special guest and an interloper.

Aziraphale asks about the chef’s mother and the waiter’s sister and business generally, a veiled inquiry about if those property developers have been back again, a lifted eyebrow but no real surprise in his eyes when he says, “Oh I’m glad they’ve decided to leave you alone. Soho wouldn’t be Soho without you.”

They order their usual: all Aziraphale’s favourites and sake for Crowley. As he pours for both of them, Aziraphale says, “You know, I sold one of those Thomas Hardy books today.”

“Not Desperate whatevers?”

“Have you _still_ not finished it?”

Crowley becomes fascinated by the tiny scores on the window someone has left with the side of a coin. “Of course I have.”

“Well don’t worry. It was _The Woodlanders_. The most adorable student came in and was quite delighted to have found a copy he could afford.”

Crowley lifts an eyebrow. “Seems you’re growing quite used to actual book selling, these days.”

Aziraphale beams. “When one isn’t fond of the book in question, it really is very much easier.”

“So that’s the key, then? From now on you’ll only be selling books you don’t like?”

“Perhaps I’ll turn it into a shop exclusively of Thomas Hardys.”

Crowley makes a pained expression. “Oh please don’t. I couldn’t bear that.”

Aziraphale leans across the table as if Crowley’s in actual distress, covers his hand with his fingers, and Crowley feels as light as hydrogen.

They eat their sushi, with Aziraphale waxing lyrical about soy sauce and how the wasabi here is the perfect amount of fiery, and then stroll back amongst the late night scurriers, and party-goers, and the theatre crowd, their arms linked.

The rain has stopped, left a sheen which reflects them back at themselves on the street, and in it, they look thoroughly entwined. Of all the things they’ve done in the past year, all the quiet little adventures of spider plant tending and book selling, this sort of thing is what Crowley likes best, when they’re amongst the world but it feels like just the two of them.

Aziraphale unlocks the bookshop door and Crowley makes his usual scan of the shelves and the balcony, craning his head and tuning in to celestial or demonic energy that might be loitering out the back. It’s been radio silence from all of their former colleagues, but he still can’t help it, the impulse to search every room for signs they’re about to be attacked.

They have a plan.

Or to be precise, they have a promise from Mavis to tip them off the second Hell mobilises, a handful of half-baked ideas, and an agreement about where to meet if they get separated.

Some days it’s easier than others to shake the feeling of borrowed time. With linked arms and a quiet dinner, it’s easy to forget that two weeks ago, Crowley jolted awake, seeing shadowy enemies in the doorway, spikey, visceral fear everywhere from his scalp to his knees. He didn’t scream, though, and the shaking stopped quicker than it used to, soothed away by Aziraphale’s fingers. They whispered the details of their plan to each other like illicit lovers making assignations, and then Aziraphale made enough chamomile tea to calm an army and read to him from the sequel to that novel about the ill-suited pair who squabbled over blancmange at house parties held by barons.

They both have their ways of coping, he supposes.

Aziraphale potters about finding wine and glasses and a record. He holds several covers up for Crowley’s approval and Crowley nods in the direction of a compilation of love songs from the mid-century that he knows Aziraphale likes but would never listen to without his choosing it.

Having meticulously wiped it free of dust and put the record on the gramophone, Aziraphale joins him, holding out a glass of wine.

“Thank you,” Crowley says, and, as he takes the glass, he catches Aziraphale’s now empty hand with his free one. He pulls him closer and sets the wine down on the desk.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, settling into the dancing pose with an expression of mild surprise.

His hand finds Crowley’s waist gingerly, as if he can tell Crowley’s nerves are still firing from the foot massage and casual touches over dinner and he doesn’t want to wear them out. They’re more used to being close to each other now than they were a year ago, have mapped each other’s wrists and feet and faces with their fingertips, traced thighs and ribs and shoulders with their tongues, but there’s still a thrill to it, to being bathed in Aziraphale’s aftershave, the calmness of touch that radiates through Crowley’s clothes and seeps all the way into his soul. 

They turn a slow circle in the middle of the bookshop, the spider plants in the window wafting their leaves as they pass. Aziraphale is, truth be told, not much of a dancer, but he is truly excellent at swaying and first class at nuzzling Crowley’s neck.

“Happy anniversary, my darling,” he says, and Crowley kisses him lightly on the temple and rests his nose there.

They make another pass of the floor. All the times he thought about Aziraphale, he never thought about this, about quiet, completely ordinary moments of undemanding contentment. 

Aziraphale draws away. “I should change the till roll,” he says.

Crowley makes a face. “You’re thinking about the till roll, while dancing with me on our anniversary?”

“Actually, I was thinking that I shouldn’t want to have to get up early to do it and therefore truncate the night I’m spending with you on our anniversary, while dancing with you on our anniversary.”

“Oh well in that case.”

They kiss each other’s fingers and break apart, retrieving their wine, and while Aziraphale goes over to the desk to coo at the till to secure its cooperation, Crowley browses the shelves.

The next track is a grandiose ballad, Judy Garland starting out full pelt, pulling it back just a little, before really letting the listener have it on the chorus. Her voice cracks and she sings through it, rising up to a swell that would rival that of any competent orchestra. “Can _any_ human get through this without crying?” Crowley says.

“Yes, it’s quite affecting, isn’t it?”

Crowley hums. “Reckless, if you ask me, putting this on a record where anyone might hear it.”

He takes a book down from the shelf and turns it over.

JR Hartley.

“_Do_ flies fish? Must do. This guy wrote a whole book about it. I just… I don’t get it. How do they hold the rods?”

“Maybe if you read the book rather than just periodically taking it off the shelf and asking questions of it?”

“I don’t rea—”

“You absolutely do,” Aziraphale says, with gusto. “I could list right now at least half a dozen volumes you’ve… relocated to your flat.”

Crowley mumbles something about them looking nice on the coffee table. “Rather figure things out myself,” he says, and slides the book back into position.

As he’s doing it, he has a flash of a memory: a version of himself so distant and yet so immediately, impossibly present they could be standing next to each other. He stares at the shelves. “Do you remember,” he says, but his thought dawdles off.

“What’s that?”

Crowley looks at the spine of the book.

There are universes in it.

“Nothing,” he says, but the thought won’t stay dawdled. “Just—do you remember—once—once, you asked me if demons can love.” He looks over. “If I can.”

As soon as he’s said it, he realises it’s an ill-advised thing to bring up. Why remind Aziraphale of the very thing which kept them apart for so long? Of all the—

“How foolish of me,” Aziraphale says, peering at the till roll, tongue caught between his teeth as he tries to feed the paper into the slot. “It should’ve been perfectly apparent that you can and indeed do.” He leans in, scowling at the mechanism. “Besides, you’re not a demon. You’re Crowley.”

Crowley stands there, words thunking against his ribs as if they have actual, physical force, and just for a second, he knows exactly how stars feel when they collapse into being.

“Ah, there we go.” The till roll churns, sucking in the paper, and Aziraphale punches the air. “Success!”

He beams at Crowley and it’s urgent, then, the need in Crowley’s chest.

He darts over, ruffling the papers on the desk in his breeze. “Can you—can you leave that?” he says, catching Aziraphale’s arm and tugging on his sleeve.

“It’s done.” Aziraphale takes his glasses off. “Why? What are you—what’s the—” He scans the shop with frantic eyes, as if expecting Hastur or Beelzebub to have appeared with things flaming around them, a hoard of angels pressing faces filled with righteous fury to the window panes.

“Not that,” Crowley says. “I swear not that.” He tugs on Aziraphale’s sleeve again. “Just—come with me? Please?”

* * *

It’s not a long drive; at least it isn’t the way Crowley drives it, pushing the needle up towards triple figures as they ping along the dark roads through the countryside. Trees spin past, illuminated by flashes of moonlight, the odd eyes of a rabbit lighting up along the hedgerow.

“I really don’t see why you won’t tell me where we’re going,” Aziraphale says.

He’s been trying to get accustomed to Crowley’s driving, but still, his knuckles are white where he’s gripping his knees and his tone struggles for neutrality and fails spectacularly. 

“It said exactly where we’re going on the sign back there.”

“Oh, did it?” Aziraphale whips his head round but the sign is now at least half a mile in the past.

Crowley brakes sharply at the next corner anyway, and plunges them between two rows of conifers on what’s essentially little more than a dirt track. He slows, looking for the opening. The car recognises it before he does and he swings them to the left and onto an even narrower track.

The Bentley spits them out in front of a locked gate at the start of a path which is strewn with leaves and leads up and over the hill. Crowley kills the engine.

Aziraphale shoots a dubious glance at him.

“It’s not far,” Crowley says, opening the door. “Come on.”

It’s a lovely night for it: crisp and starlit and quiet. So quiet after all the bustle of London. He already loves the air here, the way it feels on his skin, the way that once they break the tree line, the lights of other cottages will twinkle in the distance like a tiny galaxy. There’s a very good pub half a mile away, and when the wind blows in the right direction, it carries the smell of roast dinner all the way here. It mingles with the pine scent of the trees, homely and civilised and wild all at once.

He strides between the old oaks, with Aziraphale on his heels demanding to know what they’re doing and where they’re going, what on Earth he’s playing at.

Moonlight breaks through the clouds as they crest the hill, and falls on the sprawling, patchwork countryside. In the daylight, it’s a mix of flaxen crops and rich green winter vegetables and strips of verdant pasture which seem to roll all the way to the horizon. There, chalk hills contain what any decent painter would rank amongst the best views in the entire world.

“That’s it,” Crowley says, and points at the cottage that rests halfway down the hill.

“What?”

“That’s where we’re going.”

His feet can barely keep up with each other and Aziraphale skids after him on the damp grass. “What? But who lives there? There aren’t any lights on. Are we expected?”

They stumble to a halt outside, with Aziraphale straightening his coat and looking towards the kitchen window as if expecting someone to run out, remonstrating with them and waving a rolling pin in a threatening manner.

“Do your thing,” Crowley says, and mimes tugging on a dangling cord.

“I can’t just—”

“There’s no one here.”

Aziraphale rolls his eyes but obliges anyway. “Let there be light,” he says, and their immediate area floods, illuminated in warm white, soft and whimsical as moonlight.

It falls on a sloping roof with twin chimney pots and enough moss to make it look bedded into the landscape. It falls on red brick walls with painted windows and a faded green door. And, best of all, it falls on Aziraphale looking at it for the first time.

“So?” Crowley says.

Aziraphale’s forehead creases. He peers at the cottage, taking in the rambling foliage around the windows and scanning up towards the curtains on the upper floor. The crease deepens.

“You don’t like it?” Crowley says, and his nerves riot.

Stone, he should’ve done stone, and something less… something. He should’ve finished, should’ve waited until he was happy with it himself. He should’ve—

Aziraphale’s hand flutters to his chest and he rocks back on his heels. “What is this—? What’s it for?”

Crowley shifts from one foot to the other. “Us,” he says.

The word just hangs there.

His mouth feels startled at the shape of it, in a way that suggests he hasn’t said it before.

Of course he has, but it’s as if its meaning has changed. This _us_ is a different one to any other he might previously have referred to. It’s attached, now, to a place and a feeling and a promise. It’s heavy, with both the past and the future.

“We don’t have to live here,” Crowley says. “I like London—you do too—and you’ve got the bookshop. I just thought it’d be nice to have somewhere to come. Country air, you know? Good for you.”

With a curious, searching gaze, Aziraphale says, “And how did you come by such a place?”

Crowley avoids his gaze.

It’s become a little too searching.

“Internet is a really wonderful thing,” he says. “Loads of places like this for sale. Loads. S’where I’ve been. On the internet. Looking at property.”

“That _would_ make your feet sore.” Aziraphale considers him with a raised eyebrow. “Have you… purchased it?”

Crowley mumbles.

“For what price?

Crowley mumbles some more, adds a shrug.

“When do we get the keys?” Aziraphale says. “That’s the custom, isn’t it? The way humans do it?”

Crowley attempts a mumble and gives up halfway through it.

He didn’t expect this pounding in his chest, but he should’ve; he can’t even let Aziraphale watch him pot baby spider plants. It’s too much to be observed, caring. Makes him feel jittery, like all of him is edges that are suddenly rubbing against each other. Just as Aziraphale has had to work to shrug off the weight of Heaven’s version of what goodness looks like, so Crowley has had to grow comfortable being undemonic. He’s had to acclimatise to how it feels when certain layers of the walled-in version of himself are peeled back, who he is laid out to be seen, to just let it happen without raising his hackles and fearing punishment for slipping.

Aziraphale leans in, so close Crowley’s cells can feel him, and his voice is low and so very soft. “You built this, didn’t you? You built all of it. Every single thing.”

Crowley scrutinises the exterior. There must be something not lined up, something that looks like it’s not obeying the laws of physics. He constructed the cottage like he would a galaxy, from the atoms up, in infinite detail, but he’d never actually done a building before. There was a lot to learn. He pulled volume after volume down from the shelves in the bookshop, skim-reading rapaciously and stroking photographs so he’d remember the particular way a lintel was pleasing, a certain kind of window or brick that felt right in a way he couldn’t explain. He must’ve messed something up, something so basic Aziraphale spotted it straight away.

But the windows look fine.

The door’s straight.

The ground is… on the ground.

He chose a site that will be rampant with wildflowers in summer and mushrooms in autumn and shaded at the rear by trees in a mix of fir and oak, so they’ll have greenery and variety all year round. The garden, he set right round the house, so they’ll be able to see it from every window, a little winding pathway to the front door and another out of the kitchen on the side, through the herb garden and past the greenhouse which sits in the perfect spot for sunshine in the afternoon. He populated it with a dozen varieties of tomato plant and a couple of giant cactuses, just because he’s always fancied growing some, and there could be courgettes and cucumbers and even a melon or two. The beds out the front are informal and burst with shrubs that’ll provide a range of colours from ochre to auburn as the seasons change, and in front of that are rolling waves of daisies and clover and violets.

And roses, of course, in lilac, all around the door.

It was, he thought, perfectly imperfect. Organic-looking, as if it had been collated over many years instead of erected in merely one made up of stolen hours and overthinking.

“How’d you know?” Crowley says, scanning the garden for the giveaway.

“It feels like you.”

Crowley switches his scrutiny to Aziraphale’s face.

“This place,” Aziraphale says. “It feels like you.”

When Crowley’s expression doesn’t waver into understanding, Aziraphale spreads his hands between them. “The way someone loves,” he says, “it has its own… well, it’s almost like a smell. Or a flavour.”

“It does?”

“Oh yes.”

“And I—I have one?”

Aziraphale nods. “It’s very distinctive. I would recognise your love anywhere.”

Crowley makes a series of noises, none of which have the faintest hope of turning into actual words.

“It’s not finished,” he says. “I need to pick a wallpaper for the living room and the library is… well, it still needs a lot of work.”

Soft as a feather, Aziraphale touches Crowley’s arm. “There’s a library?”

“Like I said, it still needs work, so if you don’t like it, I can change it. It’s all very… mutable.”

The current library is recessed into the ground, accessed by a dark wooden staircase to keep the books from too much sunlight. He plans to have plants hang from the ceiling to create a canopy and has at least two dozen reading nook ideas from Pinterest to decide between. Maybe he’ll add a fireplace for when it gets cold and eventually they’ll pepper the shelves with obscure volumes Aziraphale has been after for centuries. It’ll take years to find them all, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it, of a library. Comes together over time. He’s determined to believe that time is something they will have.

“I’m sure it’s perfect, just as it is,” Aziraphale says, fingers lingering on Crowley’s sleeve before slipping down to take his hand. “What else will there be, when it’s finished?”

Crowley puffs his cheeks out, blows air at the night. “Music room, I thought, maybe? I saw a really nice one years ago—palace of some sort, domed roof like a couple of turnips—shells in the ceiling, great acoustics, very pretty. And palms, I think. Lots of palms. Whole room full of palms, so I can keep an eye on them. Make sure they don’t get any ideas.”

“Well, that sounds lovely.” Aziraphale smiles up at him, but there’s trepidation there, too. “And… a bedroom?”

They haven’t slept together in a bed yet. Sofas, sure, and the floor, and on one memorable occasion back in the spring, on a picnic blanket on the beach while the waves crashed. It was very romantic, until the freezing tide rushed halfway to their knees while they were distracted with each other.

He’s not sure why it should be any different to get into bed together. It’s just a mattress. Just blankets and pillows and the same stuff they’ve shared time and time again.

But he knows that it would be, that it would mean something, even though a couple of weeks ago, he wandered through his flat, noting Aziraphale’s shoes by the door and his coat hanging above, a winged mug sitting upside down on the draining board.

‘Aziraphale, have you… have you moved in?’ he said, and Aziraphale looked up at him from the book he was reading as if the question were ridiculous.

‘You said I could stay at yours,’ he said.

And Crowley supposed well, yes, he did.

But that was his.

This is theirs.

A bed would be theirs.

“Several bedrooms, actually,” Crowley says. “Seemed presumptuous to only make one.”

“It would not have been,” Aziraphale says, and squeezes his fingers, “for the record.” Aziraphale takes a deep breath, eyes roving over the garden, taking each plant in. “And the flowers?”

“Just flowers, really.”

Aziraphale glances at him askance.

His eyes twinkle.

And it hits Crowley like a meteor.

“Oh. Oh you—you know, don’t you. You know I took the book.”

“Perhaps,” Aziraphale says, with a smile. “And you. You know, too. You saw.”

Crowley pictures all the flowers pressed between the pages, the petals that he found by accident and kept close to his heart as if they’d been pressed there instead. The meanings weren’t the ones in the book, weren’t the ones indexed by colour and flower type. The flowers pressed between entries meant _I wanted to remember these moments I had with you. Scattered through the ages. Good and bad. Playful and hurtful and all things between._

Aziraphale’s grip on Crowley’s hand tightens.

Crowley wants to say: _I have loved you for aeons. I have railed against it and tried to outgrow it, have pulled it apart in an effort to see how it works, to see if I can rid us both of the burden of it. I have feared it and loathed it and wallowed in it. I have got wasted on it, tried to sleep it off, only to get drunk on it again. In vain I’ve tried to hide it from you and shown it to you all the same because it won’t be hidden. It seeps out of me even when I don’t mean it to. _

_And so fine, I stitched it into a garden, so it will always grow, so we can move amongst it, so we can run our hands through it and lift it to our noses, so you can clip it and press it into a book and see it preserved so you know that it’s there. This one means devotion and this one means endlessly, and this one means you are so charming I want to rake my fingernails right through you like the dirt which feeds everything. _

Crowley lifts their hands to his mouth, rests Aziraphale’s knuckles against his lip. 

Aziraphale takes a deep breath. “I think I’m rather in love with it, this place.”

Crowley looks at him.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Aziraphale says. “Surely that’s what you meant to happen?”

Crowley breathes out against the back of Aziraphale’s hand.

Before, when he was moving about the rafters and the garden alone, Crowley couldn’t quite picture how they’d live here, if it was too quaint, if they’d both feel like a Monet tea towel borrowed from the gift shop and shoved into a bucolic, slightly blurred landscape. But now he can see it, Aziraphale picking symbols of love from the garden to take back with them, himself in the car, pretending he’s annoyed about how long it’s taking.

It wasn’t the same as building a galaxy.

Smaller, for one thing. More intricate, for another. And space only has to function in the void of itself. Something goes wrong with a star, people just assume that’s what stars do.

No, building this was more like gardening. It was fed with hope. Creating a love that’ll last as long as infinity will is, he thinks, like nurturing a seed into a plant into compost into another plant descended from the first, doing that over and over and over. It’s daunting as Hell, now he thinks about it.

And he’s not scared anymore.

He can love.

He does.

And Aziraphale can feel it.

“Perhaps you’d like to give me a tour?” Aziraphale says.

Crowley leads him through the garden.

With each step, more flowers bloom around them, the shrubs rustling to attention and the trees behind the cottage leaning in, offering their protection.

The plants here are different to the ones in the flat.

They don’t cower, they enjoy his attention, don’t try to please him, but do, anyway.

“Just one more thing,” Crowley says.

He halts by the roses, clips one with the scissors he just happens to have in his pocket. He tucks the rose into Aziraphale’s lapel, tugs it down until the base is perfectly nestled against the soft, worn fabric of Aziraphale’s coat. Should Aziraphale look, he’ll find that each lilac rose has a miniature galaxy buried at its centre, shaped like a heart.

“How does it look?” he says.

“Enchanting,” Crowley replies, and with a click of his fingers, he opens the door.


End file.
